


Experiments with Tequila

by earlgreytea68



Series: Scotch [15]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-19
Updated: 2012-08-26
Packaged: 2017-11-12 10:40:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/489986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlgreytea68/pseuds/earlgreytea68
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which John is away, Sherlock is bored, and Lestrade is baby-sitting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to all the usuals, to chicklet73 who brilliantly beta'd, and to sensiblecat for the Britpick.

“It isn’t going to work,” said Sherlock, standing in the doorway of their bedroom and looking displeased. 

“You can’t know that, you’re not a fortune-teller,” John told him, and retrieved a couple of jumpers from his drawer. 

“No, but I _am_ Sherlock Holmes and I have deduced—”

“You’re the world’s only consulting detective,” John interrupted him, zipping up the duffel bag, “and no one has asked you to consult. Or detect, for that matter.” He walked past him, into the lounge, taking the duffel bag with him. 

“I don’t see why it’s your problem anyway,” said Sherlock, following him. 

John picked up the train ticket where he’d left it on the desk. “Because I’m her older brother.”

Sherlock made an expression of distaste. “Older brothers always think they have to interfere in matters that are none of their business.”

“Oh, really?” John asked him, balefully. “The way Mycroft interferes in your business? Have you been experimenting on this apple?” He held it up for inspection. 

“No,” Sherlock told him. And, “Yes, exactly like that.”

“The way Mycroft interfered by intervening and sending you to rehab when you needed it. That sort of interference.”

Sherlock narrowed his eyes. “Who told you that? It wouldn’t have been Mycroft; it had to have been Lestrade.”

John took a bite of the apple and then gestured at Sherlock with it. “Mycroft saved your life. That’s what older brothers do. That’s what _I’m_ doing.” He pushed past him again, grabbing his jacket from the back of his chair as he went. 

“Mycroft didn’t save my life,” Sherlock denied, impatiently. “I was fine.”

John paused at the top of the stairs, looking back at him. “You were addicted to cocaine. Which is no one’s definition of ‘fine.’”

“I wasn’t _addicted_ to it,” said Sherlock, hotly, clearly offended by the implication. “I didn’t need it when the people around me weren’t being boring. How was that my fault?”

“You have one of the most addictive personalities I’ve ever encountered,” John told him. “You’re addicted to so many things, you make my head spin.”

“I am not,” said Sherlock, petulantly. “You won’t let me have any of it anymore. You and Mycroft.”

“I let you play around in crime scenes and run experiments all over the house, including on me, even when you don’t ask me for permission, which I really wish you would and you know I wish you would.”

“If I ask you for permission, it inevitably affects the outcome of the experiment. You’ve a background in science, _think_.”

“Yes. I _am_ thinking. I have to go.”

“I don’t understand why the intervention couldn’t be in London,” Sherlock sulked. 

“Because Harry doesn’t live in London.”

“Doesn’t she have a computer?”

“You don’t do an intervention via Skype, and I’m not talking to you about this anymore. Please stop being selfish for a little while; I think you can manage.”

“But _you’re_ my current addiction,” Sherlock pointed out. “I’m going to suffer terrible withdrawal without you.”

“Ring Mycroft and see if he’ll pay for another fancy rehab,” said John, as he jogged down the stairs. 

Sherlock frowned. “I am not the only one in this flat with an addictive personality, you know,” he called down the stairs to John. 

“Oh, believe me, I know,” John said, as he pulled open the door. “I have no other explanation for why I would put up with you.” 

***

Sherlock paced the lounge in a tight circle, his hands clasped behind his back. He paced with heavy footfalls. He was seeing how long it would take Mrs. Hudson to come up and check on him. 

347 seconds. That was how long. 

“Sherlock, you’re trampling like a herd of elephants.”

“Hardly, Mrs. Hudson,” he said, but he did stamp a bit harder, just because he could. 

“John hasn’t even been gone an hour yet.”

“John has been gone 36 minutes,” Sherlock told her, “and I am _dying_ of boredom.”

“Can’t you watch something on the telly?”

“On the _telly_?” Sherlock practically shrieked at her. “What would I watch on the _telly_?”

“I don’t know, Sherlock, you love yelling at those terrible talk shows.”

Sherlock scoffed. “Only when John’s here. What’s the point of yelling at them without an _audience_?” Honestly, people were so stupid that it pained him. 

“I suppose I could sit here with you if it would help—”

“No, Mrs. Hudson, that would _not_ help,” Sherlock snapped at her. As if Mrs. Hudson were an adequate substitute for John. As if anybody on the planet were an adequate substitute for John. 

“You could play your violin,” Mrs. Hudson suggested. 

“No, I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s _boring_.”

“You love your violin.”

“No, I don’t. It’s boring.”

“You play it all the time.”

“When _John’s_ here, Mrs. Hudson. John is not here. Can’t you see that John’s not here? Surely even you can observe that John is not here. Look around this flat.” Sherlock gestured dramatically. “Tell me if you see John here. You do remember what he looks like? Short, with that little face.” Sherlock made a gesture with his hand that, to his eye, approximated John’s face. “Do you see anyone fitting that description here? Anywhere in this flat? Hiding behind a sofa, possibly? No. You do not. Conclusion: John is not here. John has been gone for 38 minutes now.” Sherlock collapsed dramatically onto the sofa. “I am going to _die_ from how boring everything is.”

***

Lestrade’s mobile was flashing Mycroft’s number at him, and he lifted his index finger to interrupt what Colin was telling him and answered it, because Mycroft seldom phoned in the middle of the day without a purpose. “Hello,” he said, pleasantly. 

“Are you busy?”

“Moderately. Did you need something?”

“To talk.”

Lestrade glanced out his window, at the black car idling within perfect view. “Give me two minutes,” he said, and hung up the phone and turned back to Colin. “It isn’t a bad theory,” he said to him, “but you’d need to explain the reason for our time of death estimate being off.”

“Well, that could be temperature, couldn’t it?”

“Do you have any reason to believe the temperature of the body was mucked about with?” Lestrade was pulling on his coat, because it was a drizzling unpleasant day and he’d got wet that morning coming into work and had been unable to shake the chill and he wanted a coat even if he was only going to dash out to Mycroft’s car. 

“I feel like yes, I do, but I can’t put my finger on why that is.”

Lestrade had no problem with police work by hunch. He thought hunches were what people who weren’t Holmeses had to rely on. He thought they were moments of observation your subconscious had picked up on that your conscious hadn’t caught up to yet. Holmeses didn’t have those moments, but regular people did, and if Colin had a hunch, then Lestrade was willing to give him some leeway to chase it. “Go through the files again,” Lestrade told him. “Take note of anything that makes you uneasy.”

“Okay. Are you leaving for the day?” Colin looked only mildly curious, and it occurred to Lestrade he had become used to Lestrade dashing about and keeping strange hours. 

“No, just a couple of minutes,” he promised, and left him in his office, heading outside and turning his collar up against the rain, thinking that maybe he’d take the file of the case Colin was talking about home that night and see why it wasn’t triggering any uneasy feelings in him. It was possible his subconscious had missed whatever Colin had seen. 

Lestrade pulled open the door of Mycroft’s car and ducked happily into the warmth of the backseat. 

“Here,” said Mycroft, and handed him an umbrella. 

Lestrade was terrible about umbrellas. If he remembered to bring one in the morning, then he forgot to bring it home from work that night. Or he left it at a crime scene. He took the umbrella, but said, “I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not, you got damp this morning and you’ve been cold all day.”

“How do you _know_ that?”

“Your posture is different when you’ve caught a chill. That’s the way you sit when you’re on the verge of making the fire too big at home.”

“Oh,” said Lestrade, because that did make sense. 

“I have a favor to ask of you,” Mycroft told him, carefully. 

The words sounded rusty in Mycroft’s mouth, which was unsurprising, since Mycroft seldom asked for favors. 

“What is it?” asked Lestrade. 

“My brother is going to need a case. Have you anything interesting?”

Lestrade sighed. “It would be lovely if you would come to see me at work and ask for a favor and the favor would be something deliciously naughty possibly involving partial nudity and the backseat of this car.”

Mycroft smiled briefly. “I’ll save that for next week.”

“Why does he need a case? We just _finished_ a case. Just this morning you were saying how nice it was to see me over the breakfast table, and now you want me to go seek out another one of Sherlock’s cases.” Sherlock’s cases were never easy cases. They weren’t cases that let him get home for dinner and get full nights’ sleeps and have leisurely breakfasts. That was the point of them being Sherlock cases. 

“I know,” said Mycroft, and he looked apologetic. “But John phoned me.”

“John phoned _you_?” Lestrade tried not to be hurt, because John almost always phoned Lestrade, even when it was really Mycroft he wanted to talk to. 

Lestrade knew Mycroft noticed he was hurt, but was grateful Mycroft didn’t comment on it. Mycroft continued, “He’s going to see his sister. His sister’s current…” Mycroft considered what word to use, then waved his hand instead. “Thought it might be worthwhile to stage an intervention.”

“What a bloody mess,” said Lestrade, on a sigh. “Poor John. I wish it would take, this time. I wish you could give him some advice.”

“John is clever enough to have already grasped the advice I would have given him.”

“Which is?”

“That the only way to tamp down on one addiction is to provide another. You’ve conquered an addiction, wouldn’t you agree?”

He would, actually, it was why he’d developed a number of smaller habits when he’d first stopped smoking, trying to have something to do to fill the time when he would have been enjoying a cigarette. 

Mycroft knew he would agree, so he didn’t wait for a response. “This means, of course, that my brother is currently alone in the flat.”

“And,” concluded Lestrade, “with access to one addiction thwarted, Sherlock will need access to another addiction. And you’d rather it be crime than anything else.”

“Yes.” Mycroft was solemn as he looked across at him. “Do you mind terribly?”

Yes, he minded, thought Lestrade. He liked his job a great deal, and he liked it best when it was being interesting, and that usually meant that his best days at work coincided with days when he was with Sherlock. But Sherlock was always trying and an effort and he’d just come off a case with Sherlock and he’d been looking forward to a day or two, at least, of recovery. Not everyone had the energy to deal with Sherlock Holmes constantly the way John seemed to. 

“Not at all,” said Lestrade. 

Mycroft surprised him by laughing. “You really are the worst liar I’ve ever met. I don’t understand why you even attempt it.”

“I don’t understand why you ask me questions you know I’m going to lie in response to,” Lestrade countered, a trifle irritated. 

“I don’t want you to lie in response. If you mind, I’ll…” Mycroft trailed off. 

Lestrade had no idea what Mycroft’s alternative plan was. He supposed Mycroft must have one, but he also supposed that Mycroft had depended on Lestrade’s affection for him to compel Lestrade to help. Which had been a safe bet on Mycroft’s part. 

“I’ll find us something,” Lestrade told him. “Hopefully. How long do you think we have before things get dire?”

“One hour?” Mycroft guessed. “Possibly two?”

“I don’t understand how John deals with him. Then again, John doesn’t understand how I deal with you, so I suppose that makes us even.”

Mycroft looked startled. “How you deal with me?” he echoed. 

Lestrade chuckled. “This conversation was worth it just for that look on your face right now.” He reached for the door handle. 

Mycroft said, “Thank you. Really.”

“You owe me now.”

“Send me an invoice,” said Mycroft. 

“Have Reynolds send me something for dinner. If I’m finding a case for Sherlock, I likely won’t be home.”

“Of course.” 

Lestrade opened the door, and Mycroft said, “Greg, the umbrella.”

Lestrade turned back and reached for it and said, “Cheers,” before ducking back into the rain, but he didn’t even bother to put the umbrella up as he dashed back into New Scotland Yard. Mycroft would probably chide him for that, he thought. 

He shook rain out of his hair and headed back to his office, feeling a bit sorry over having to tell Colin that they needed to find a good case somewhere and needed to resign themselves to working around the clock for a little while longer. 

His mobile rang as he was walking, and he pulled it out and looked in disbelief at Sherlock’s number flashing up at him. “Seriously?” he said to the phone, and then answered it. “Yeah.”

“I need a case,” Sherlock clipped out to him. 

“Already? How long has John been gone?”

“Did he phone you before he left? No. He wouldn’t have. He was angry with me, and phoning you would have been the nicer option, so he phoned Mycroft, who phoned you, and that’s excellent, because you should already have a case for me by now.” Sherlock sounded pleased. 

“Brilliant deduction,” Lestrade told him, sweeping into his office and shrugging out of his coat. “Except that I don’t.”

“What? How? How can you be so incompetent as to not even be able to find me a case? I’m not asking you to _solve_ it, I would never hold such a lofty notion for you, but now it is asking too much to request that you even _find_ a case?”

Lestrade tossed his coat over the chair opposite his desk. “We just finished a case, Sherlock,” he reminded him. “I’ve been doing paperwork all day.”

“And laying low,” Sherlock concluded. “ _Boring_.”

“Yes,” agreed Lestrade, sitting behind his desk. “Every once in a while, that doesn’t bother me.”

“Because _you’re_ boring,” Sherlock told him. 

“Thank you,” said Lestrade. “I love you, too.”

“I just need someone to murder someone else.”

“Keep being this annoying, and it’s possible that I can arrange that,” Lestrade remarked, dryly. 

“Don’t be tedious,” said Sherlock. “Find me a case.”

“I’m working on it,” Lestrade replied, and then had the sneaking suspicion he was talking to dead air. “Sherlock?” No response. 

Lestrade sighed and walked out to Colin’s desk. “We need a case,” he said, shortly. “A good one.”

“But I thought you said we were going to take it easy for a day or two.”

“I’ve changed my mind.”

“Is this about Sherlock?” asked Colin, on a sigh. Colin didn’t hate Sherlock with the passion with which Sally had hated Sherlock—that, frankly, would have been a difficult thing to equal—but Colin didn’t like Sherlock, which Lestrade didn’t blame him for, because almost nobody liked Sherlock. Sherlock ordered Colin around and generally terrified him in that way he had, so Lestrade understood Colin’s sigh of displeasure. Lestrade hated to say that he was half-grateful to Sherlock for being so impossible. Colin had stopped being terrified of Lestrade after having met someone genuinely terrifying in Sherlock. 

“Yes,” he said. “So it needs to be a good case. Also, it is my advice that you avoid dating men who have annoying little brothers.”

“I don’t date men,” Colin replied, lightly. He had taken it in stride that Lestrade these days did, and a very odd man who Lestrade knew terrified Colin nearly as much as Sherlock. Mycroft was never anything other than polite to Colin when they ran across each other, which usually happened only when Mycroft stopped by New Scotland Yard, but Lestrade understood that a polite Mycroft was a good ten times more terrifying than a rude hooligan. Lestrade also wondered if Colin suspected that Mycroft had the power to transfer Colin in a heartbeat if he didn’t like something about him. Lestrade liked Colin well enough and had forbidden Mycroft to do anything of the sort, but Colin wasn’t an idiot and sometimes Mycroft made veiled threats about such things out of force of habit. 

“The same applies to women,” Lestrade told him. 

“I’ll keep that in mind. Thank you for the advice, sir.” 

Lestrade made a wry gesture of _no problem, don’t mention it_ , went back to his office, phoned Mycroft, and told him to send over good coffee, because Lestrade was not tackling Sherlock this time around with only bad coffee for assistance. 

***

Colin asked him if he had any threes, and Lestrade told him to go fish, and Sherlock said from the doorway, “ _Go Fish_? Are you playing _Go Fish_?”

Lestrade looked at him over his feet propped on his desk. Sherlock looked both shocked and disapproving, and he also looked as if he couldn’t decide where to frown—at Lestrade, at Colin, at their respective hands of cards, at the piles of matches in front of them, at the draw pile in the middle of Lestrade’s newly cleared desk. His frown flickered everywhere all at once. 

Lestrade looked back at his hand and requested a six, which Colin handed over. 

“Lestrade,” said Sherlock, plainly furious at being ignored. “What are you _doing_?”

“You already deduced what I’m doing,” remarked Lestrade, putting his pair of sixes into his pile of matches. “Have you got a seven?”

“Go fish,” said Colin. 

Lestrade leaned over and drew a three and filed that away to request of Colin at the next hand. “What are you doing here?” he asked Sherlock. 

“I came to see if you had found a case yet.” Sherlock stalked into his office. “And it’s a good thing I came, because it’s clear that, instead of doing anything approximating your job, you are busy playing a child’s card game.”

“Colin, what are you looking for?” Lestrade asked him, calmly, because Colin was staring at Sherlock’s frankly spectacular display of pique. 

“Uh,” said Colin, and glanced at his hand. “A queen?” 

“Go fish,” Lestrade answered. 

“You should ask him for an eight and a two, and he’s still got that three that you just picked up on your last draw,” Sherlock told Lestrade, unabashedly studying Colin’s hand. 

“Sherlock,” said Lestrade in annoyance, and tossed his hand on his desk. 

“Good. Go find me a case.”

“We’re trying to find you a case. There haven’t been any calls. Also, Gregson wants to know why he doesn’t get to get anything interesting anymore because I pounce on all of them, so there are Scotland Yard politics going on at the moment.”

“Politics,” snorted Sherlock. “That’s a big word for such a petty disagreement.”

“Says the king of petty actions,” Lestrade pointed out. “You are more than welcome to work with Gregson if you want. I won’t be jealous.”

“I can’t work with Gregson,” Sherlock told him. “And you _would_ be jealous.”

Which was maybe a little bit true, and that was annoying, and Lestrade frowned at him. “Colin, can you go around asking very nicely and see if anybody has anything for us yet?”

“Yes, sir,” said Colin, and scurried out of the office. 

Sherlock leaned against the window to the rest of the station and watched Colin’s progress, saying as he did so, “Look at you. What would Mycroft say?”

“About what?”

Sherlock looked at him and lifted an eyebrow. “Playing Go Fish?”

“Sometimes you feel like a chess game, sometimes you feel like Go Fish.”

“Mycroft never feels like playing Go Fish,” said Sherlock with certainty. 

Which, Lestrade conceded, was probably true. “Didn’t you ever play it as boys?”

“You think we played _card games_ together?” Sherlock asked, sounding pitying of Lestrade’s deep stupidity. He looked back out at the station. “Gregson hates me.”

“Most people hate you.”

“What happened to Donovan? Did Mycroft have her killed?”

“Transferred.”

“That’s practically the first intelligent thing my brother has ever done,” said Sherlock, and sat in the chair Colin had just vacated, picking up Colin’s hand of cards. “Give me the three you have,” he said. “And also the ace. And the two. Oh, look, I’ve won.”

“It now becomes clear to me why you and Mycroft never play card games.”

Colin came back up to the office doorway. “Gregson said…that he didn’t have any cases.”

“Thank you for censoring that,” said Lestrade, wryly. 

“No cases. All right, then,” said Sherlock. “What should we do instead?”

Lestrade blinked at him. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Hasn’t Mycroft asked you to keep me occupied? If you’re not going to find me a case, what are we going to do instead?”

“Nothing,” said Lestrade. “I’m not your _baby-sitter_.”

“Mmmm, could have fooled me,” said Sherlock and stood energetically. “Colin!” he exclaimed. 

Colin jumped, startled, and looked at him warily. “What?”

“You have a theory about something. An old case. Well, older. One I wasn’t around for, possibly? Yes, that’s it, isn’t it?” Sherlock looked at Lestrade. “An unsolved case you didn’t share with me?”

Lestrade shook his head. “Solved. We had a confession.”

“But?”

“Tell him, Colin,” said Lestrade, because he was curious as to the outcome of this and he thought it would be good for Colin to have to defend a theory against Sherlock Holmes’s scrutiny. Sherlock was obnoxious, but he did keep you at the top of your game. 

“I don’t think it feels right,” Colin said, after a moment. 

Sherlock narrowed his eyes at Colin. “Show me the files,” he commanded. 

“Hang on,” Lestrade said, even as Colin turned to obey Sherlock. Sherlock looked at him. “How did you know he had a theory at all?”

Sherlock gave him an _oh, please_ look. 

“Fine,” Lestrade relented. “You can go with Colin to the file room, but you’re not to leave Colin’s sight and you’re to come back here in twenty minutes’ time. Look both ways before you cross any streets and hold Colin’s hand.” He tried to do it straight-faced, but he couldn’t quite pull it off. 

“Shut up,” said Sherlock, sourly, but there was a bit of a spring in his step as he followed Colin to the file room. 

Lestrade grinned and shuffled the deck of cards and laid out a game of solitaire on his desk.


	2. Chapter 2

Sherlock came back saying that Colin was quite right and the murderer had been the confessor’s seven-year-old daughter. It had all been an accident; she had confessed to protect the child, and the time of death was off because the body had been by the boiler. 

“The boiler was off,” Lestrade said. “We checked that.”

“You checked it poorly,” Sherlock told him. “So, now that that’s settled, what shall we do next?” Sherlock sat in one of the office’s guest chairs and looked at him brightly. 

“ _Nothing_ ,” said Lestrade. “We’re not doing _anything_ next.”

Sherlock changed his face to a studied version of a pathetic puppy-dog pout. “My brother’s worried about me. He’s entrusted me to your care.”

“He asked me to find you a case,” Lestrade corrected. 

Sherlock worked the pout a bit more. 

“Stop that,” said Lestrade. “You look ridiculous.”

“I suppose,” said Sherlock, on a heavy sigh, “I’ll just have to go home. My lonely, lonely flat. Where I’ll be home all alone. I do hope nothing tragic happens. And I hope my dear brother forgives you if anything tragic _does_ happen. It would be terrible for him, of course; he loves me so.”

“You don’t even _believe_ that,” Lestrade pointed out. 

“But you do,” Sherlock countered. 

Lestrade sighed. “Bloody…” A sudden idea struck him. He looked at Sherlock. “I’ll just take you to my house.”

Sherlock looked alarmed. “What?”

“My house.”

“You don’t have a house.”

“Of course I have a house.”

“It’s _Mycroft’s_ house.”

“And my house, too. And it would be terrible if you had to go home to your lonely, lonely flat, and I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if something tragic should happen, so you can come home with me. We’ll have a slumber party.”

“I don’t go to that house,” said Sherlock, and his voice was oddly flat, in a way Lestrade had never really heard it before. He’d been half-teasing about the whole thing; he had no real intention of dragging Sherlock kicking and screaming to Mycroft’s for an evening. He’d rather sit here in New Scotland Yard fighting with him all night. 

But Sherlock wasn’t reacting as if he were teasing, and wasn’t reacting at all the way Lestrade had expected him to. He sat up a little straighter in his chair, studying him. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t,” Sherlock clipped out, “go to _that_ house.”

“But you do.”

“When?”

“You showed up there when you made your first grand reappearance from your ‘death,’” Lestrade reminded him. 

“That was different,” Sherlock responded, stiffly. “John was in danger. Do you think normal rules apply when John is in danger? Do you think _any_ rules apply when John is in danger? The fact remains: I do not go to that house.”

Well, this was interesting, thought Lestrade. He wanted to press the point, interrogate a bit. It seemed more than the usual Mycroftian needling going on. But tonight was not a night when he wanted Sherlock to storm out into London in a temper, not without the ability to find John to calm him down, and not when Mycroft was already worried about him and he was supposed to be finding a way to keep him out of trouble. 

So Lestrade said, instead, “Where’s Colin?”

“He’s in the file room.”

“Doing what?”

“I’ve asked him to update my statistics on the methods used in crimes of passion; wouldn’t do to fall behind the times with my data.”

“ _Sherlock_ ,” said Lestrade. 

“What? He’s very good with discrete, mechanical tasks, you know. Much better than Donovan was. He’s good. I approve.”

“I wasn’t waiting for your approval,” Lestrade informed him, standing. “And you can’t give him _work_ to do.”

“Why not? He isn’t doing anything else. He’s playing Go Fish with you.”

“I’m his supervisor! I’m the one who gets to tell him what to do!”

“Like play Go Fish?”

How had he got into this ridiculous argument? “Yes. Like that. If I want. Stay here. Do not move a muscle. I’m fetching Colin.”

“And a case!” Sherlock called after him. “Fetch Colin _and a case_!”

Lestrade gritted his teeth and went to the file room and found Colin obediently compiling things for Sherlock. 

“What are you doing?” Lestrade demanded, with perhaps a bit more sharpness than he’d quite intended. 

Colin looked guilty. “I…He asked me to…”

“You don’t have to do what he tells you to do.”

“But it’s easier.”

That Lestrade could not disagree with. “Put everything away and come back to my office,” Lestrade commanded. 

He went back to his office and found Sherlock sitting in his chair, unabashedly going through his desk drawers. 

“What are you doing?” he asked, and then wondered why he was surprised that this was what Sherlock was doing; he should never have left him in the office by himself. 

“You told me to stay here,” said Sherlock, still rooting through the drawers. 

“I also told you not to move a muscle.”

“That’s impossible; I can’t stop my heart from beating.”

“Get away from my desk,” Lestrade commanded. 

“He writes you notes, and you keep them,” remarked Sherlock, and Lestrade knew he went pink and hated himself for that. Sherlock glanced up at him. “That’s _sentiment_ , Lestrade, and that’s dangerous.”

“How is it dangerous?” Lestrade asked. 

“He’s Mycroft Holmes. He’s the most dangerous man you’ll ever meet,” Sherlock answered. 

“Put the notes back,” said Lestrade, quietly, “close the drawer, get up, and walk away from my desk.”

There was a moment of utter silence in his office. Sherlock looked at him, and Lestrade watched his surprise turn to disbelief turn to, amazingly, a form of chastised awkwardness. He cleared his throat and did exactly as Lestrade had requested, moving past Lestrade to the other side of the office. Lestrade leaned on his desk and looked out the window to the darkness outside and counted to ten. 

“Sir?” said Colin, from the doorway, hesitantly, because Lestrade knew the mood had shifted from mild irritation to imminent storm in the span of a minute. 

Lestrade turned and faced the two of them: Colin in the doorway and Sherlock in the farthest corner of the room, by the filing cabinet, watching him warily. He made a decision. “We’re going out,” he announced, and reached for his coat. 

“Who is?” asked Sherlock, carefully, as if he suspected Lestrade might kill him if he said the wrong thing at that moment. 

Which was possibly true. “All of us,” said Lestrade. “Colin, get your coat.”

Colin immediately disappeared from the doorway. He’d probably been waiting for any excuse. 

“Even me?” asked Sherlock. 

“Even you,” said Lestrade, and then, “There was a line there, and you crossed it. I don’t know exactly where it was, but you’re the great Sherlock Holmes, and surely you’re clever enough to figure it out. So don’t cross it again.”

“Right,” said Sherlock, slowly. 

“Now. Come on.” Lestrade headed out of his office, switching off the light as he went. 

“Lestrade, I don’t—”

“Not home,” Lestrade assured him. 

“Where then? Did you find a crime?” Sherlock was suddenly right by his elbow like an over-eager puppy. 

“I don’t ‘find’ crimes, you know, lying about like…bad pennies or something.” Lestrade paused, waiting for Colin, who was wending his way through the desks. “We’re going to the pub.”

“The pub?” repeated Sherlock, and frowned. 

“You don’t normally go to pubs,” said Lestrade. 

“No. Not normally. Not if I can help it.” 

He looked very much like Mycroft at that moment. Lestrade had seen the same expression on Mycroft’s face. An aristocratic distaste so ingrained within them that they didn’t even quite realize they were being snobs. 

Lestrade decided against saying how much Sherlock was reminding him of Mycroft, because his alliance with Sherlock was fragile at the moment. He said, instead, “You are missing out on the best place to read humanity. And, if we’re very lucky, maybe there’ll be some sort of brawl we can break up.”

“That sounds promising,” said Sherlock, and turned up the collar of his coat. 

Lestrade followed him outside and immediately remembered that he’d left Mycroft’s umbrella in his office. Bugger. 

***

The pub was crowded. More crowded than Lestrade had expected. 

“Rugby,” said Sherlock, as Lestrade was fighting through the crowd for a table, and Lestrade looked at the large screen over the bar. Sherlock was right. 

Lestrade found a table and sat them at it. “Do you watch rugby?” he asked, because Mycroft had no interest in any sports at all. 

“No, but John does,” said Sherlock. He was surveying the crowd. “What are we going to do next?”

“We’re going to order pints. Do you have a preference?”

“Not especially,” said Sherlock. 

“Get him whatever you think,” Lestrade told Colin. 

Colin nodded. 

Sherlock was tapping a finger on the table, full of nervous energy, and looking around himself with interest. 

“You must have come to pubs when you were younger,” Lestrade remarked, because he thought Sherlock would have done it just to irritate Mycroft. 

“I did many things when I was younger, most of them I don’t do any longer,” Sherlock replied. “But it’s just another addictive substance, isn’t it?”

“Pubs?”

Sherlock gave him a baleful look. “Alcohol.”

“The key to breaking one addiction is to indulge in another.”

“You sound like Mycroft now.”

“It was a paraphrase of Mycroft.”

“Of course it was.”

“Does it really bother you?”

“Does what really bother me?” asked Sherlock, deliberately obtuse. 

Lestrade sighed and decided not to press the issue, and Colin returned with their drinks. 

“Hold it,” said Sherlock, and lined up each of the pints next to each other, leaning down so he was eye level with the table and studying each of them closely. 

“What are you doing?” asked Lestrade, because they were getting funny looks from the tables around them. 

“I’m _observing_ , which you never bother to do.”

“I’m observing all the people around us conclude you’re a git,” said Lestrade. 

“People,” scoffed Sherlock. “Who cares what people think? People are boring.”

“Unless one of these people turns out to be a serial killer, then he would be infinitely interesting. Are you quite done now? Can we drink them yet?”

“Yes. Fine. Mine, at least, isn’t poisoned. I cannot say the same for yours, Lestrade, but I care about that less.”

“It’s not poisoned,” Lestrade assured him. “People don’t poison pints at pubs, Sherlock.”

“They should; it would make pubs more interesting. And no one here is a serial killer; everyone here is dreadfully boring. This is a very boring place.” The _Next!_ , Lestrade thought, was implied. 

Lestrade already felt exhausted. How did John stand this? Maybe John just shagged him all the time. Maybe it got rid of all the excess energy. 

“Let’s play a game,” announced Lestrade. 

“Old Maid?” asked Sherlock, both bland and scathing at the same time. 

“Hilarious,” Lestrade told him. “No, a drinking game.”

“A drinking game.” This piqued Sherlock’s interest, Lestrade could see. A competition, Lestrade thought, and suddenly wondered how well Sherlock could hold his drink. “What’s the game?”

“Guessing people’s names from context clues.”

“Full names?”

“Sherlock, how would we ever do full names?”

“I could do full names,” said Sherlock. 

He probably could, too. “Fine, you’re doing full names, it’ll handicap you. If the person guessing is wrong, that person takes a drink. If he’s right, the other two people at the table have to take a drink.”

“Good.” Sherlock nodded. “Well, I’ll always be right and you’ll always be wrong, so I’ll win this game.”

Lestrade sighed. 

“How will we know if we’re right or wrong?” Colin asked. 

“We’ll take turns asking people’s names, to verify.”

“Have you played this game at a pub before?” Colin looked dubious. 

Lestrade hesitated. 

“Oh, my God,” said Sherlock. “You _have_.”

“Mycroft thinks pubs are boring, too,” said Lestrade, and drank to cover his embarrassment before remembering that the game hadn’t started yet. 

“Does Mycroft do full names?”

“No, but I’m going to make him start, after tonight.”

“Yes, because he’s being lazy if he’s not doing full names.”

“Or maybe he’s just trying to get me drunk.”

“I can’t imagine that’s difficult, Inspector,” said Sherlock, and then, “Blonde bloke at the table behind you.”

“What, already?” said Lestrade, because he hadn’t even started to figure out who he was going to target yet. 

“Yes. His name is Albert Hoddleston III.”

Lestrade glanced over his shoulder at the man in question. A kid, not more than twenty, with his blonde hair arranged into towering spikes and so many piercings in his face that Lestrade lost count after ten. He looked back at Sherlock. “Seriously?” he said. 

“Serious as a murder,” said Sherlock. 

“Do you know him? Because that’s cheating if you know him.”

Sherlock frowned. “I disagree that that would be cheating, but no, I don’t know him.”

“Fine. I’ll go ask him.” Lestrade slid out of his seat and walked over to the kid and tapped him on his shoulder and said, “Excuse me, are you Albert Hoddleston III?”

The kid looked startled. “Who are you?”

“Just wondering if that’s your name.”

“Yeah,” he answered, slowly. “Am I in trouble? Who are you?”

Lestrade flashed his badge very, very briefly, and then wondered if he was already drunk. “Scotland Yard. Just checking up. Keep yourself in line, eh?”

The kid blinked at him. 

Lestrade walked back to the table and said to Sherlock, “Bloody showoff.”

“Yes,” said Sherlock, smugly. 

Lestrade drank obediently. 

“Purple-haired girl over there.” Sherlock nodded in a direction. 

“No, no, no. You have to let us have turns.”

“Well, hurry up,” said Sherlock, impatiently. 

Lestrade looked to his left, pretending to find someone while simultaneously eavesdropping hard on the table to their right. The bit of pretense worked, because Sherlock frowned off in the direction Lestrade was staring in, and when Lestrade said, abruptly, “Ginger to our right, named Tom,” Sherlock replied, “That’s just a wild guess.”

“Check it,” said Lestrade. 

Sherlock, still frowning, stood and walked over to the table. 

Lestrade looked at Colin. “You don’t have to play if you don’t want to. It’ll distract him; that’s the important thing.”

“No, I’ll play,” Colin said, looking determined. 

Sherlock came back and said, immediately, “You cheated.”

“Drink,” Lestrade told him, and, looking sour, he did. 

“Good. Colin’s turn.”

“The purple-haired girl is named Annabel,” said Colin. 

Sherlock made a noise of outrage. “That’s…that’s not fair! How did you know that?”

Colin fairly beamed with triumph. “Drink,” he said, with a grin. 

Sherlock glared at Lestrade, and Lestrade clinked his glass against Sherlock’s in amusement, and they drank together.


	3. Chapter 3

They had nearly finished their third round of pints, and things hadn’t got messy yet, but Lestrade could tell they were possibly on the verge of tipping into it. Which was fine with him at the moment, because he was pleasantly buzzed, at the stage when drinking more seemed like a very excellent idea. 

It was Lestrade’s turn to guess a name, and he was trying to figure one out. They’d already been through all the obvious people near them, which meant their net was being cast much farther out, which meant that he and Colin were having a much harder time of things and even Sherlock had faltered once or twice, to his annoyance. It was not helping matters that his head was a bit fuzzier than it had been when they’d first walked through the door. 

So, when his mobile flashed on the table, ringing although he could not hear it in the noise of the pub, he seized upon the distraction immediately, noting it was Mycroft and answering it with a slightly more exuberant than necessary “Hello!”

“Cheating!” Sherlock accused immediately, and Colin, grinning, concurred and even brought his palm down on the table in a dramatic manner. 

“It isn’t cheating,” Lestrade said. “How is Mycroft going to know the name of anybody in this pub?”

Mycroft said, without missing a beat, “But I do. Sherlock Holmes.”

“Oh,” said Lestrade. “That’s actually quite clever.” He pointed at Sherlock and announced, “Bloke with the dramatic cheekbones and the too-long dark hair. Named Sherlock.”

Sherlock scowled. “That makes no sense.”

“Nevertheless, check it.”

“I don’t need to check my own name.”

“I’m going outside to talk to Mycroft,” said Lestrade, sliding off his chair. 

“Also, you said it was cheating to guess the name of someone you already knew!” Sherlock shouted after him. 

Lestrade pushed his way through the pub, ducking outside, where it was raining harder. He must have made an involuntary noise because Mycroft said, “And you didn’t bring the umbrella with you, did you?”

“Of course I did,” he lied. 

Mycroft made a low skeptical sound. “Go back in the pub. I don’t want you to stand outside in the rain talking to me.”

Lestrade stepped closer to the wall, sheltered by an awning above him. “I’m under an overhang,” he assured him. 

“You took him to a pub, Greg?” said Mycroft, sounding intensely curious. 

“I had to do something with him; he was driving me mad at the station.”

“You could have just sent him home.”

“That didn’t seem wise to me at the time.”

“I didn’t mean to force you to spend the evening making him behave.”

“Yes, you did,” said Lestrade, and experienced one of those moments of knowing he wouldn’t have said that if he hadn’t been drinking. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes, you did.” Mycroft sounded amused. “How much have you had to drink?”

“Not much, really, but we’re playing the drinking game. Oh, _by the way_ , it’s come to my attention that you could do full names, not just first names.”

“Of course I could, Greg,” said Mycroft, mildly, as if it Lestrade should have figured this out much earlier and it wasn’t Mycroft’s fault he hadn’t. 

“You’re a despicable cheat,” Lestrade accused, affectionately. 

“No, merely a bureaucrat. You’re enjoying yourself.”

“Yes.” Lestrade was surprised to admit that was true. “I am.”

“I was going to tell you that you didn’t have to keep him entertained and you should come home, but you’re actually having fun, so instead I’m going to tell you that you should stay out.”

“You should join us.”

“That’s not a good idea.”

“I’m sure you could beat Sherlock at this full name thing. Plus, you’d have three pints’ advantage.”

“Which is hardly fair. Anyway, Sherlock and I don’t play games together.”

“No, Sherlock and you play nothing _but_ games together; you just never play any fun ones like this. It occurs to me this is exactly what you both need. You should get drunk together and complain about how stupid everyone else on the planet is but the two of you. Why _don’t_ you do this?”

“You should not attempt to drive home,” said Mycroft. “I’m going to send a car to the pub and have it wait for whenever you’re ready to leave, and you should stay out as long as you like and have a good time.”

“Sorry,” said Lestrade. “Did that make you angry? I didn’t mean to make you angry.”

“You didn’t,” Mycroft replied, smoothly. 

“You could possibly start with Go Fish. Have you ever played Go Fish with him? It might work, you know. The positive effects of a good game of Go Fish should not be underestimated, Mycroft.”

“You have an alcoholic confidence in your ability to solve all of the world’s problems right now. I find you quite adorable, actually. Go inside and have a fourth pint.”

“Can you really tell how many pints I’ve had just from a conversation?”

“I can when you tell me, during the course of the conversation, that I’d have three pints’ advantage were I to join you right now.”

“Right,” Lestrade realized.

“I should have made you drink more Scotch during our first dates; you’re much easier to impress when you’re like this,” remarked Mycroft, with laughter lurking in his tone. 

“I’m hanging up on you now.”

“Is it your turn when you go back in to guess a name?”

“I don’t know. Probably.” 

“I know the full name of another person in the pub.”

“Who is it?”

“Dashing Scotland Yard detective inspector, rumpled, wet because he didn’t bring an umbrella with him. His name is Gregory Lestrade.”

“You’re hilarious.”

“Quite,” said Mycroft. 

Lestrade hung up his phone and ducked through the rain back into the pub. 

***

Halfway through the fourth round, Sherlock pronounced the drinking game boring. 

Lestrade was mostly surprised that it had taken three and a half rounds to get there.

“What should we do instead?” asked Sherlock.

Feeling less than creative at the moment, Lestrade said, “What would you like to do?”

Sherlock frowned. “I wish I’d thought to do an experiment with the pints. But then, we haven’t a control group. I should have thought of that.”

“You do a lot of experiments, don’t you?” Colin asked.

Sherlock narrowed his eyes at him. “Why?”

“Just curious. I don’t know much about you. Other than you’ve returned from the dead, of course.”

“Well, that’s your own fault,” said Sherlock. “Don’t you read the newspapers?”

“ _You_ don’t read the newspapers,” Lestrade pointed out. 

Sherlock ignored him. “I was all over the newspapers before I died. So to speak. Everything you might want to know about me. Courtesy of Mycroft, I believe.” Sherlock cast a glare in Lestrade’s direction.

Lestrade sipped his beer. 

“I used to read the blog,” said Colin. 

“My blog?” asked Sherlock, hopefully. 

“No, John’s blog,” said Colin, and Sherlock scowled. “But it leaves out a lot,” Colin continued. “There’s so much I don’t know. Like, how did you get to be a consulting detective anyway?”

“How else would any crime ever get solved in London?” demanded Sherlock. 

“Sherlock,” sighed Lestrade, half-heartedly, more to save face than out of any real desire to try to correct him. 

“But why not just join the police force?” asked Colin. 

Lestrade laughed hard enough that he had to wipe tears from his eyes. So did, surprisingly, Sherlock. Lestrade had never seen him laugh like that before and credited it to the beer. 

Colin looked between them, bemused. “What’s so funny?”

“Him?” said Lestrade. “On the police force?” And then dissolved into laughter again. 

“So how did it start, then?” Colin asked him. “Did he ring you one day asking if you had any interesting cases?”

Lestrade looked at Sherlock. Sherlock looked back at him but looked away before Lestrade could get a read on his expression. Sherlock then took a long sip of his beer. More of a gulp. Lestrade read between Holmesian lines the way he so expertly and automatically did these days, looked back at Colin, and left all of the seediness out of the story. “He ran across my path while I happened to be dealing with a particularly tricky case, and he solved it for me,” he said, which was true, as far as it went. 

“It was utterly obvious if you knew where to look,” said Sherlock, “which you didn’t.”

Sherlockian, Lestrade supposed, dryly, for _Ta ever so much for not bringing up my shady past_. 

“So how would you do it?” Colin asked Sherlock, propping an elbow on the table and his chin in his fist. He looked extremely curious. 

“How would I do what?” Sherlock replied.

“You’re always saying the culprit of a murder is so obvious, there’s always some telltale clue left behind. So what are they all doing wrong? How would you do it?”

Sherlock continued to look puzzled, an unusual look for him, and Lestrade chalked that up to the alcohol as well. 

“Commit the perfect murder,” inserted Lestrade, having grasped what Colin was asking, and Colin nodded. “He’s asking how you would commit the perfect murder. You’re so clever. Tell us how you’d get away with it.”

Sherlock looked quizzically from him to Colin and back again. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. He said, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” said Colin, sounding as surprised as Lestrade felt. 

“Why would I have given any thought to the question?” Sherlock asked, irritated that he had ever had to say he didn’t know something.

“You solve murders for a…hobby,” Lestrade said, deciding that was more accurate than _for a living_. “And you haven’t given any thought to how it would be done properly?”

“That’s boring.” Sherlock waved a hand about. 

“Getting away with murder is boring?” said Colin. 

“Yes. Who cares about getting away with a murder? I don’t care about the crime; I care about _solving_ the crime. The crime could be anything. I don’t care, so long as it’s interesting, and interesting people seldom commit petty theft, let’s face it. But what’s the point of any of it if _I’m_ the murderer? That would take all the fun out of it. The best part would never happen: There would never be a puzzle. I would always know it was _me_. So no, I have not considered how I’d get away with murder; the answer doesn’t interest me.” Sherlock took a sip of his beer, then said, self-consciously, to the staring Lestrade, “What?”

“Donovan was so wrong about you,” Lestrade realized. 

“Donovan was an idiot. Colin’s much better.”

Colin choked on his beer. 

Lestrade said to Sherlock, amused, “You’re possibly drunk.”

Sherlock frowned at the sputtering Colin. “You shouldn’t let it go to your head. It isn’t difficult to be better than Donovan.” Sherlock slid off his chair, saying, “Finish your pint, Inspector, next round’s on me. And when I come back, I expect to hear all about how _you_ would commit the perfect murder, since you find the idea so fascinating.”

“He is so thoroughly impossible,” Lestrade told Colin. “And possibly incredibly drunk, considering I’ve never seen him buy a round before.” Lestrade obediently finished his pint as Sherlock had requested. 

“Have you been for drinks with him before?” asked Colin. 

“Good point,” said Lestrade. 

“So you weren’t friends before you started working together?”

Lestrade considered the question. “I’m not sure we ‘work together.’ I’m also not sure we’re ‘friends.’”

“That’s not true, he likes you.”

“He tolerates me, which is more than he does for most people. I’m not complaining. I’m used to him now. And he may be difficult to get along with, but I trust him more than many other people I’ve worked with over the years. And you should, too. Stand your ground against him, but recognize that he’s almost always right about things. Annoyingly.”

“Do you know what he told me about you?” 

“I can just imagine,” said Lestrade, grimly. “When did he tell you anything about me? When I was on the phone?”

“No, when I first met him. He said I was lucky and should pay attention to you because I could learn more from you than any other DI at Scotland Yard.”

Lestrade was startled and pleased. He wondered if he was blushing. “Did he really?”

“And then he said that wasn’t saying much, considering the stupidity of the rest of Scotland Yard.”

Lestrade laughed. 

Sherlock put a shot down in front of him and said, “What’s so funny?”

“What,” Lestrade asked instead of answering, staring at the shot, “is this?”

“Change of pace,” said Sherlock, sliding a shot in front of Colin and resuming his seat. “Experiment.”

“I am having bad flashbacks to experiments involving tequila in uni,” Lestrade told him. 

“Who was running those experiments?” asked Sherlock, as if they had been sanctioned by the NHS or something. 

“No one person was in charge,” Lestrade answered, dryly. “They were more of a group effort.”

Sherlock made a dismissive sound. “Well, I’m running this experiment, so it will be done properly.”

“Does the experiment involve us doing shots?”

“Yes.”

“Then I think the outcome is pretty much going to be the same.”

“I wasn’t paying enough attention to the effects of the beer on each of us, because _you_ —” he pointed an accusatory finger at Lestrade—“were too busy distracting me with that silly game.”

“You liked that game,” Lestrade pointed out. 

Sherlock ignored him. “This time, I am going to pay attention and observe the different effects the tequila has on each of us.”

Lestrade eyed the shot in front of Sherlock. “You’re drinking, too?”

“Of course. How else will I determine that my brain is less susceptible to tequila than your brains are?”

Lestrade regarded Sherlock, wondering idly if Sherlock had done many shots in uni and wondering also if there was any way, even if Sherlock _had_ done shots, that he was more adept at holding his tequila than Lestrade had once been. Yes, that was years ago, but Lestrade decided that one’s body never really forgot how to react to an addictive substance, once it had learned. “I,” said Lestrade to Sherlock, “am looking forward to how your powers of observation survive tequila shots.”

“How much was this tequila?” asked Colin, abruptly. 

“I feel like that question is a rude question. That’s what John would tell me,” Sherlock informed Colin, primly. 

“I’m just saying that I’m not drinking cheap tequila without lemon and salt.”

“Good man,” said Lestrade, as Colin stood in search of it. 

“Lemon and salt to drown the taste?” Sherlock asked Lestrade. 

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s just silly,” said Sherlock, and abruptly knocked his shot back. 

Lestrade lifted his eyebrows in surprise. 

Sherlock made a face and said, “Oh, my God, that tastes _terrible_.”

“You should have waited for the lemon and the salt,” Lestrade told him, wisely, as Colin returned with both. 

“Why would anyone drink anything that tastes so bloody awful?” Sherlock asked, still making a face. 

“To get drunk quickly,” Lestrade answered, and, relying on sense memory for a process he hadn’t done in years, licked between his thumb and his forefinger. Sherlock was watching him closely, and Lestrade moved a bit more slowly than he would have under normal circumstances. If he tried to walk Sherlock through the process, Sherlock would get offended and insist he didn’t need assistance. If he simply slowed down, Sherlock would observe it and learn it. Even with one shot inside of him already, Lestrade supposed.

He sprinkled salt and picked up a piece of lemon, then quickly licked the salt back up, tossed back the tequila, and bit into the lemon. He and Colin put their shot glasses back on the table at almost the exact same moment. 

“We need to have another experiment,” Sherlock announced, and stood and walked away from the table. 

“Oh, God, what now?” said Lestrade. 

“I haven’t done a shot in years,” remarked Colin. 

“And you’re young,” Lestrade pointed out. “Think of how many years it’s been for me.”

Sherlock arrived back with three more shots and more slices of lemon. 

“What the hell is this?” Lestrade asked. 

“Another shot,” Sherlock replied, calmly, resuming his seat. 

“You’re insane,” said Lestrade. “We just had a shot.”

“And we’re going to have another one.”

“No, we’re not.”

“I need to compare, with and without salt.” Sherlock pouted at him. 

“ _You_ compare. I’m not comparing. I did that comparison in uni.”

“You can have it with salt again, but we need to drink at the same rate for purposes of my experiment.”

“Let’s do it,” said Colin, licking his hand again. 

That had to be the result of the tequila hitting, Lestrade thought. He knew the tequila was also behind him sighing, “Oh, fine,” and licking his own hand as well. 

Sherlock, looking delighted, followed suit. Salt, shot, lemon, in quick succession, and Lestrade, feeling the pub sway slightly with it, said, “I am far too old for this.”

“No, you’re not,” Sherlock told him. 

“Absolutely no more shots,” he said. 

“Tell me how you’d commit the perfect murder.”

“After two shots?” Lestrade said, disbelievingly. 

Sherlock nodded and looked very interested. So did Colin. If the interest from the other side of the table was slightly drunken, Lestrade was drunk enough himself not to notice. 

“You can’t commit a perfect murder after two shots,” said Lestrade. 

“I could _solve_ a murder after two shots,” asserted Sherlock. “Easily. Phone Scotland Yard, see if they have any cases for us.”

“We are not going to work like this,” said Lestrade, grateful he was still clear-headed enough to know that wasn’t a good idea. 

“Well, what else are we going to do? You’re being boring,” Sherlock complained. 

“A perfect murder has to be motiveless. It’s impossible to commit a motived murder without making any mistakes.”

Sherlock was looking at him closely. “Why do you say that?”

“Because emotions breed mistakes. And the sort of emotions that lead people to kill other people? Those aren’t casual emotions. You can’t kill someone, with any sort of emotion, and not make a mistake eventually, somewhere, somehow. Sometimes those mistakes are noticeable by people like me; sometimes they’re only noticeable by someone like you. But they’re always there. There’s no such thing as a perfect murder.”

“What about serial killers?” asked Colin. 

Lestrade shook his head. “They have emotion. They want to be noticed. Geniuses love to be noticed. Isn’t that right, Sherlock?”

Sherlock didn’t answer the question. He said, “What about hired assassins?”

“There’s emotion in the hiring, that’s where the mistake would come in.”

Sherlock considered, fingers steepled in front of his lips. Lestrade thought he was going to say that Lestrade was being an idiot, just because that was normally what Sherlock said to him. What he said instead took him completely by surprise. “You sound just like Mycroft.”

“I do?” Lestrade blinked. “In what way?”

“Caring is not an advantage. Isn’t that Mycroft’s motto?”

Confused, Lestrade tried to think past the haze of tequila clouding his brain. “I…Is it?”

Sherlock cocked his head at him curiously. “He’s never said that to you,” Sherlock realized. “ _That’s_ interesting.”

Lestrade bristled a bit. “Why is that interesting? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We need more alcohol,” Sherlock announced. 

“No,” said Lestrade, sharply. “We definitely do _not_ need more alcohol.”

“But I’m not observing anything about the effects of tequila,” Sherlock complained. 

“Yes, you are, you’re just not observing that you’re observing the effects,” said Lestrade. 

“Or you’re observing that you’re observing the effects but you’re not observing that you’re observing that you’re observing the effects,” contributed Colin, leaning a bit closer to Sherlock in drunken camaraderie. 

Sherlock looked at him for a moment, then said, abruptly, “While I’m flattered by your attention, Colin, I think you should know that I consider myself married to my work.”

Colin blinked at him in the moment of silence that followed this speech before Lestrade began laughing. 

Colin frowned at Lestrade and said, “I don’t think this is funny.”

Which only made Lestrade laugh harder. 

Colin, still frowning, looked at Sherlock. “I’m not gay,” he said. 

“It—doesn’t matter—with Holmeses,” gasped Lestrade, and continued laughing. 

“Why,” demanded Sherlock of him, sternly, “are you behaving this way? Is it the tequila?”

“No, it’s not the _tequila_ ,” said Lestrade, catching his breath, then considered. “Maybe it’s partly the tequila. But, seriously, you gave me the exact same speech the first late night we worked together. I kept trying to figure out what signals I’d been sending you to get that speech, but it turns out you just give it to _everyone_. Do you think you’re that irresistible?”

Sherlock looked displeased. Lestrade thought, vaguely, that Sherlock did not seem to be a happy drunk. “I just think it’s better for everyone involved in a relationship to know the rules dictating that relationship from the outset. And I don’t mean _that kind_ of relationship, I just mean all human interaction.”

Lestrade could not stop being amused. He recognized this was the tequila, which had had the same effect in uni, and even though half of it might be artificial, it was rather nice to feel so taken with the absurdity of Sherlock Holmes, instead of being annoyed by it. “Did you give that speech to John, too?”

Sherlock hesitated a moment too long. 

“You did!” Lestrade was practically gleeful in the conclusion. 

“I don’t see what business it is of yours,” said Sherlock, stiffly. 

Lestrade, feeling benevolent, let him off the hook. “It isn’t, you’re right. But you should really revise that speech now.”

“What do you mean?” Sherlock sounded impatient. 

“You’re not married to your work, you’re married to John.”

Lestrade had never punched Sherlock, although he had thought about it many times. He thought, if he had ever given into the temptation, Sherlock would have looked much the way he looked at the moment. He sat and stared at Lestrade, silent and stunned, and Lestrade realized Sherlock had never really thought of that before, had genuinely never analyzed his relationship with John enough to realize the truth of it. 

After a long moment, Sherlock stood and said, sounding a bit dazed, “We need…”

“No more alcohol,” Lestrade told him, firmly. 

Sherlock disappeared, and Colin leaned over the table. “Have I been doing anything to make him think that I—”

Lestrade shook his head, biting his cheek to keep from laughing again. “No, he’s just being—”

Sherlock abruptly returned to the table, although he didn’t slide back into his seat. Instead, he stood by Lestrade’s elbow and dropped a package of cigarettes to the table in front of him.

Lestrade, looking at it, fell silent. 

“You said no more alcohol,” Sherlock pointed out, reasonably. “You didn’t say anything about cigarettes.”

“You’re not playing fair,” Lestrade remarked. 

“Because, after two shots of tequila, a cigarette does sound good, doesn’t it?”

 _Good_ was an understatement, thought Lestrade, eyes on the package. He tried to distract himself with logistics. “Where did you get those?”

“Come outside and smoke one cigarette with me, Inspector,” said Sherlock. 

Lestrade tapped his index finger on the table, a habit he’d picked up when he had been quitting smoking and that he hadn’t done in a while. He also felt himself lick his lips. He said, “Just _one_.”


	4. Chapter 4

The first drag was so staggeringly heavenly that Lestrade leaned the back of his head against the wall behind him and closed his eyes and sighed, “Bloody hell.” 

Sherlock, beside him, said, casually, “Good?”

He sounded detached enough that Lestrade opened his eyes and looked at him curiously. Sherlock exhaled a stream of smoke into the heavy mist around them. “Better than yours, apparently,” he remarked. 

“I wish I were so simple-minded that I could take a single drag on a cigarette and be so exceptionally delighted,” Sherlock replied, scathingly. 

Lestrade was grateful for tequila and nicotine, because he didn’t even care about the insult. He took another drag of his cigarette and said, “I don’t care if it makes me simple-minded, it’s nice to be exceptionally delighted every once in a while.”

Sherlock made a skeptical sound but said nothing else. 

Lestrade enjoyed the silence and the cigarette and the pleasant warmth of his state of drunkenness. Eventually, he said, “Do you think I have any chance of Mycroft not finding out I smoked this cigarette?”

Sherlock eloquently snorted. Then he said, “Don’t let Mycroft be self-righteous with you about it. Mycroft has been known to sneak a cigarette every once in a while, in times of great crisis.”

“Has he?” Lestrade considered. “Not since I’ve known him.”

“As if you would _notice_ ,” said Sherlock. “You notice almost nothing.”

“I notice things about _him_ ,” Lestrade insisted. 

Sherlock made a face and took another drag of his cigarette. 

Lestrade hesitated, then figured that the only time to have this conversation was after a night of drinking. “Does it bother you, in a genuine, actual way and not just a Sherlockian, perfunctory way?”

“‘Perfunctory’ is a big word for you at this point in the evening,” said Sherlock, and looked at him quizzically. “Does what bother me?”

“Mycroft and me.”

Sherlock inhaled through his nose and knocked some ash off of his cigarette and said, “Why should it bother me?” in the tone of voice he used when something definitely bothered him. 

“You tell me,” said Lestrade. 

“It’s just so typically _Mycroft_ ,” Sherlock complained. 

“What is?”

“He’s terrible at letting me have anything. He always has to _steal_ it.”

“I’m sorry, what is it of yours that he’s stolen?” Lestrade thought he knew the answer to this, but he wanted to hear Sherlock say it. 

“You, of course,” Sherlock answered, sounding impatient at Lestrade’s stupidity. 

“You do realize that I don’t _belong_ to either one of you.”

“Yes, you do. You used to belong to me, and now you belong to him, and that’s inconvenient for me and it’s typical of him.”

“How has my relationship with Mycroft changed anything about the way we work together?” Lestrade asked, choosing to ignore the part of the conversation where he was a commodity being possessed by Holmeses. 

“We’ve never gone to a pub together before,” Sherlock pointed out. 

“Well, I think that’s a nice change,” said Lestrade. “I think we should do this more often.”

“I think it’s dull, and I’m only here because I miss John. Otherwise, I would have gone home long ago.”

Lestrade finished his cigarette. “I think you’re having an excellent time.”

“Your powers of observation are atrocious under the best of circumstances. I did not think anything could make them worse, but, astonishingly, tequila seems to have accomplished it. I have more cigarettes.”

Lestrade shook his head. “However, I will do another shot with you.”

“Colin’s already ordered another round,” asserted Sherlock, confidently. 

He was right about that. 

***

The last round of tequila shots might not have been the best decision Lestrade had ever made. And, his age making him, in his head, the adult of the group, he took responsibility for the last round squarely. It hit him hard and quickly, and hit Colin much worse, and Lestrade had to do some maneuvering to get them all safely out of the pub and into Mycroft’s waiting car. 

He couldn’t tell how the round affected Sherlock, half because his own head was spinning too much to draw such a conclusion and half because Sherlock was behaving like an irritating and illogical drunk person but that was the way Sherlock often behaved. 

“Cars,” complained Sherlock, slumping into the car’s backseat. “Mycroft is always sending _cars_.”

Lestrade ignored him and gave the driver Colin’s address, followed by Baker Street. 

“What is it he _does_?” Colin asked. He was drunk, but there was also a keenness to his eyes as he leaned toward Sherlock. Lestrade did not answer questions about Mycroft, really, and Lestrade thought maybe Colin was taking too much advantage of the tequila shots. 

“What _doesn’t_ he do?” Sherlock responded, waving his hand about dramatically. 

“Sherlock,” said Lestrade, warningly, because he’d rather they didn’t blow Mycroft’s cover entirely. 

Sherlock spoke through him, to his eager audience of Colin. “He does _everything_. He is the most dangerous man you will ever meet.”

“No, he’s not,” Lestrade told Colin, and then, to Sherlock, “Will you stop saying that?”

Sherlock gave him a pitying look. “My God, he has you fooled. Would you open your eyes, Lestrade?”

“They are quite open, thank you very much.” Lestrade turned back to Colin. “He’s very nice. He’s not going to do anything to you.”

“Unless you so much as give Inspector Lestrade a hangnail,” drawled Sherlock. “I do believe he would start a nuclear war over the slightest amount of displeasure on Inspector Lestrade’s part. Or at least have you killed.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” Lestrade cut in, sharply, and considered leaning over and kicking Sherlock’s shin to get him to shut up. 

Sherlock fixed Lestrade with a level gaze, his pale eyes suddenly seeming not the slightest bit tipsy. He smiled without humor and he said, “He would if you asked him to. _You_ might be the most dangerous man Colin and I have ever met.”

Lestrade tried to think of something to say to that, which was difficult because he wasn’t as sober as he wanted to be for this conversation, and because his level of drunkenness allowed him to acknowledge the terrifying truthfulness of the statement. He had long thought that Mycroft would give him anything he asked for, and he was terrified that would include the sort of thing Sherlock was implying. 

The back door of the car opened, saving Lestrade from having to respond, and Lestrade registered dimly that the car must have stopped moving, that they must be at Colin’s address. Colin was already moving past him, toward the door, and Lestrade tried to salvage Mycroft’s reputation for him. “Colin, he’s really not—”

“I doubt he’d have me killed, when he only had Donovan transferred,” Colin replied, ducking out of the car. 

“He didn’t—” Lestrade began, although he knew he was a terrible liar and he was so much worse when he was drunk, it was laughable. “Oh, sod it,” he sighed, and leaned back in the seat and said, “I wouldn’t let him do anything like that to you. At least trust me, if you don’t trust him.”

Colin leaned back into the doorway to meet his eyes. “I do. If I didn’t, I’d’ve requested a transfer long before this. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“It _is_ tomorrow,” Sherlock murmured, drunkenly, and Lestrade looked at him. He had his head tipped back and his eyes closed. “Tomorrow is today. Or today is tomorrow. Either way, tomorrow has arrived, it is here at this moment. Tomorrow. We are living in the future.”

Colin ignored him and shut the door. 

Lestrade said, “I wish you wouldn’t go around—”

“Telling people the truth? I won’t support your delusions in the matter, Lestrade. Take me to Baker Street. I meant what I said about your house.”

“I already told him we’re going to Baker Street,” responded Lestrade, irritated. “You _must_ be drunk. Anyway, I’d never take you anywhere near Mycroft in this state. It would be a recipe for disaster.”

“As opposed to all the other times I interact with Mycroft. _Those_ all go swimmingly, you’re quite right.”

“They would if you tried,” Lestrade accused. 

“I do try. You’re being tiresome, do shut up.”

Lestrade huffed but felt too exhausted to plead Mycroft’s case any further. He’d do it in the morning, when the world had stopped spinning around him. He cursed the last round of tequila and concentrated on not being sick in the car. 

When the back door opened, Lestrade felt drunker than he had earlier, as if the tequila had finally finished hitting him and the world was a dizzy place. There was absolutely no way he was getting back in a car, he thought. He would use John’s bed and spend the night here and face Mycroft in the morning. But he didn’t feel entirely capable of phoning Mycroft and telling him of this plan, and texting was completely beyond him. So he slid out of the car after Sherlock and said to the driver, “Can you ring Mycroft and tell him I’m spending the night here? Or text him? Or something?”

“Of course, Inspector,” the driver said to him, and Lestrade considered that he had probably lost whatever credibility he had managed to build up over the course of his relationship with Mycroft. 

“You’re staying here?” asked Sherlock, aiming his key very carefully at the door’s lock in the manner of the very drunk. 

“I cannot get back in that car. I’ll crash in John’s bed.”

“There’s no bed in John’s room anymore.” Sherlock managed to get the door opened. “I use that room for experiments now.”

Lestrade was surprised. “You confine your experiments to one room of the flat?”

Sherlock, starting his way up the stairs, suddenly began laughing. “Don’t be absurd.”

And the idea of it _was_ absurd, which made Lestrade laugh as well, leaning on the banister for assistance with his balance as he followed Sherlock up the stairs, and Sherlock told him, still laughing and very loudly, “Shh, we’re going to wake Mrs. Hudson.”

“What _is_ going on out here?” demanded Mrs. Hudson. 

“Too late,” said Lestrade. 

“Your powers of observation are doing excellently well,” Sherlock told him, which caused both of them to dissolve into laughter again. 

Lestrade, in the course of trying to catch his breath, looked down at Mrs. Hudson at the foot of the stairs. She was wide-eyed with astonishment. “We’re not very drunk,” he assured her, which he knew was something only drunk people said. 

“Oh, no, we’re _very_ drunk,” Sherlock protested. “But it was all for an _experiment_.” Sherlock suddenly went hopping down the staircase in a manner that belied his proclamation that he was drunk. Just watching it made Lestrade’s head hurt. “Mrs. Hudson,” he said, and fastened his hands onto her shoulders and kissed both her cheeks dramatically, then pulled her into a suffocating bear hug. Lestrade blinked in surprise. “You are my _favorite_ landlady,” Sherlock told her. 

He was much drunker than Lestrade had originally thought, was Lestrade’s reaction to this. 

“I’m your only landlady,” Mrs. Hudson said, as Sherlock released her, and she swatted at him playfully but she was pink with pleasure. 

“Of course,” he rejoined, jovially. “Who else could there be, but you? Good night.” Sherlock picked up one of Mrs. Hudson’s hands and kissed it, sketching a short bow over it. It was a Mycroftian gesture if ever Lestrade had seen one, but he bit his tongue on pointing that out to Sherlock. 

Sherlock nimbly bounded back up the stairs, passing Lestrade and disappearing into his flat. 

“Good night,” Lestrade said to Mrs. Hudson, and followed Sherlock at a much more careful pace. 

Sherlock was making a racket in the kitchen, and Lestrade thought he should possibly check up on what he was doing, but instead he collapsed onto the sofa in the lounge, and he was almost entirely asleep when Sherlock came leaping back into the room, proclaiming, “Look, I’ve made you a nightcap.” He pulled Lestrade up to sitting and pressed a glass of something into Lestrade’s hand. 

“A nightcap?” echoed Lestrade, stupidly, trying to get his brain to work. “We don’t need a nightcap.”

“But I _made_ it.” Sherlock pulled a classic sulk. “I thought you’d like it, I made it just for you.”

Sherlock never made anything, and Lestrade felt guilty and took a sip and then his brain caught up with what was going on and he said, “Oh, my God, did you just poison me?”

Sherlock looked delighted. He dissolved into giggles on his chair, rolling about in mirth. 

Lestrade’s hand froze around the glass, and he tried to figure out what he’d just drunk, tried to get his tongue, fuzzy as it was, to process the flavors. “Sherlock, this isn’t funny.”

“The look on your face is _hilarious_ ,” gasped Sherlock. “That’s the look John gets whenever I make him drink something, too. Only it’s more adorable on John’s face because _everything_ is more adorable on John’s face.”

“Am I going to die?” asked Lestrade, sternly, because that _would_ be the sort of practical joke Sherlock would find hilarious. Lestrade patted at his coat, trying to determine where his mobile was and whether he should dial 999 or Mycroft. Mycroft’s number was on speed-dial, so it would just be one number for him to hit, and Mycroft’s response would no doubt be faster than any medics, anyway—

“Relax, would you? I haven’t poisoned you. It’s a nightcap, that’s all. But, when John comes home, we should play this joke on him together, so you can see how fantastic it is when that look is on John’s face.”

Lestrade knew he was extremely drunk, because he was mostly so touched at the idea that Sherlock wanted to play practical jokes _with_ him instead of _on_ him that he thought he might be in danger of getting teary-eyed. Lestrade firmly put the nightcap down, whatever it was, deciding he definitely did not need more alcohol, and stretched himself out on the sofa, closing his eyes. 

Sherlock started playing the violin, and he thought he should tell him to stop because he was surely disturbing Mrs. Hudson and the rest of the neighbors, but it was a beautiful song and Sherlock was playing beautifully well. Now that Lestrade had much more exposure to classical music, he could recognize that. So he sprawled on the sofa and let the world rock slowly up and down all around him. Water, he thought. He should get up and get some water. But it was so lovely to just lie there and let Sherlock play his violin. 

When he finished, Lestrade said, honestly, without opening his eyes, “That was lovely.”

“Did you like it?” Sherlock hesitated. “I wrote it for John, but I haven’t played it for him yet.”

Lestrade smiled. He recognized that hesitation in Sherlock’s voice, that uncertainty whether one’s beloved would like a cherished gift or be appalled by it. He assured him, “It’s beautiful.” Then he rubbed his cheek against the pillow and commented, “I wish Mycroft would write me music.”

Sherlock snorted. “Mycroft hasn’t a musical bone in his body.”

Lestrade opened his eyes and looked across at Sherlock in his chair, rubbing rosin along his bow. “That isn’t true. Mycroft adores music. He can’t play it—not to your level, at least—but he deeply appreciates beautiful music.”

Sherlock gave him a withering glare. “That’s right. I forgot. You know everything about Mycroft.”

Lestrade felt this was a fight that had been brewing ever since Sherlock had come home, that it had been nibbling at the edges of their interaction all evening, and that it was time to have it out. He sat up and said, shortly, “I know him _much_ better than you do.”

“No, you don’t,” Sherlock countered, flatly. “You think you do, because that’s how Mycroft wants it. I imagine you’re much easier to manipulate if you think you’re special to him in some way.”

“I _am_ special to him in some way.”

“People aren’t ‘special’ to Mycroft, Lestrade. Don’t be so naïve. We are all of us just pawns in the massive chess game he is playing with the world. He runs every relationship as if it’s a Napoleonic campaign.”

“He tries to,” agreed Lestrade. “He’d prefer that. He’s not nearly as good at it as he would like you to believe, and I can’t believe you’re so very blind when it comes to him that you’ve never grasped that. He can’t play a board that he cares too deeply about.”

“Of course not. That’s why he doesn’t care about people.”

“He cares very much about you.”

“He doesn’t,” Sherlock insisted. “Why can’t you see that?”

“He’s gone to a great deal of trouble, for years now, to make sure that you’re all right.”

“Because I am his responsibility. Because if anything happens to me, Mycroft has failed. Because Mycroft Holmes doesn’t fail, Inspector. At anything. Hence, the necessity that I be alive.”

“He wishes you weren’t a consulting detective.”

“Of course he does,” muttered Sherlock. 

“But he lets you be one. Even though, to his mind, the very fact of your career is a failure on his part.”

“Why do you think I have the career I do?” inquired Sherlock, innocently. 

“He doesn’t understand you or most of the choices you make, but he can’t help being ridiculously proud of you,” continued Lestrade, ignoring Sherlock. 

Sherlock laughed at him. “Where do you get such an idiotic idea? Even from you, that’s—”

“Have you never noticed how frequently he calls you in for help? I know that you have. You’ve commented on it to me, before Mycroft was anything to me. I’d noticed it even back then, suspected it all this time, without finally getting to know him well enough to verify my conclusion. When Mycroft encounters a problem—a sensitive, intriguing problem—he turns to you. For no real reason. He’s clever enough to do almost anything you do, and I know you know that, much as you hate to admit it. And, let’s be honest, you’re not exactly the most trustworthy person Mycroft knows, you’ve betrayed him several times.”

“He’s—” Sherlock began to interrupt, hotly. 

“I’m not going to compare the levels of betrayal on both sides of your fraternal relationship,” Lestrade told him. “I’m saying this because I know it’s crossed your mind that Mycroft turns to you, constantly, when he really shouldn’t, when you’ve given him no reason to think that he should and when he frankly has other options. You think he’s doing this as some sort of weird power play, although you’ve never been able to determine how it would work or what it would accomplish. I shall solve that mystery for you now: It isn’t a power play. He loves you. He’s proud of you, even though he doesn’t understand why you do what you do. He knows you’re good at it, and he’d like to show you off, and you never really let him, and he’s constantly apologizing for you, and that makes him furious with you, and then you frequently go and get yourself almost killed, and that makes him _more_ furious with you, and that in turn makes him harsh with you, and then you’re even more inclined to be cruel and reckless in retaliation when he calls you in for help again. But he always calls you in for help again. Because you never think of it this way but you’re his little brother and he, for God’s sake, _adores_ you, and you’re an idiot not to have grown up enough to realize this. I mean, _I_ knew it as soon as he told me about the violin.” Lestrade gestured to where Sherlock was still holding it. 

Sherlock looked down at the violin in his hands, and when he looked up his gaze was sharper than it had been. “What about the violin?”

“How he bought it for you.” Lestrade leaned his head back against the sofa, feeling the exhaustion of the tequila again. “Really, Sherlock, you were nothing but a boy and he bought you a museum piece for a musical instrument; you should have known right then. But it isn’t just that, it’s the way Mycroft behaves _about_ the violin. You love that violin, openly, unabashedly, in a way you’d never love Mycroft, and so Mycroft has taken the violin as a symbol of himself. It’s quite all right that you’re impossible to get along with, because you love the violin Mycroft gave you, and that’s enough, in its way. You spent eight months on the run, in constant danger, and most of the time you shut Mycroft out entirely, but you took the violin with you, and to Mycroft that was as good as getting to go along himself. I don’t know how neither one of you has worked this out, it’s textbook psychology, really.” Lestrade closed his eyes and listened to Sherlock’s silence and waited for him to say something. 

What he said was, coolly, “Mycroft didn’t buy me this violin.”

Lestrade opened his eyes and lifted his head and stared at him. “What?”

“Is that what he told you? Because I inherited this violin from my father.”

For a moment, Lestrade felt cold with dread. For some reason, the idea that Mycroft may have lied to him about the violin terrified him. He felt as if he could handle anything else that Mycroft might do in their relationship but to have lied about the violin, from those early days when Lestrade had been falling in love with him, felt like pulling the rug out from under him. And the fact of Mycroft having purchased the violin made too much sense, fit the story too well. Lestrade looked at Sherlock, and the truth of it sliced through the haze of the tequila: Mycroft hadn’t lied to him; Mycroft had lied to _Sherlock_. Because Mycroft had known, even then, even as a boy, that Sherlock would never have taken a gift like that from him, would never have _loved_ a gift like that from him. Mycroft had lied to Sherlock, and Sherlock had never had any idea. 

Lestrade felt a bit guilty about having blown Mycroft’s cover. Mycroft had never exactly told him not to say anything about the violin, but, at the same time, Mycroft frequently relied on him to know things that went unsaid, and Lestrade was sure that four tequila shots had not helped this situation. But he also couldn’t help but feel slightly pleased when he smiled and said, “Look at that.”

“What?” asked Sherlock, defensively. 

“I am observing the effects of tequila on Sherlock Holmes’s powers of observation,” Lestrade replied, and closed his eyes again. 

***

Sherlock left Lestrade snoring on the sofa. He didn’t know what was worse: having a semi-competent Scotland Yard detective inspector asleep on his sofa, or having his brother’s boyfriend asleep on his sofa. Either scenario was intolerable, he decided, and he had both at once. Sherlock hated to admit it but Mycroft had almost been deviously clever in the inconvenience he had caused to Sherlock’s life by taking up with Lestrade. 

Sherlock decided that, if John was going to be so annoying as to not come home to sleep, Sherlock could sleep in his clothing, which John never allowed him to do, so he gave up on the idea of pajamas and slid into bed in his suit and enjoyed the rebelliousness of it. There, he thought to the moonlight-clad ceiling. That would show John. 

Sherlock stared at the ceiling and huffed with impatience. He was not tired, and annoying John was much less fun when John wasn’t in the room to be annoyed. He wondered at how effortlessly Lestrade had fallen asleep. He wondered at the fact that he felt astonishingly sober for how much alcohol he had ingested that evening, on a fairly empty stomach, and, scientifically, he should be quite drunk by now. He contemplated drawing some of his blood to run a blood-alcohol test on it, but that seemed like a lot of effort at the moment. He should have thought to take blood samples as soon as they’d walked in the door, one from him and one from Lestrade. He wondered what Lestrade would do if he went out and took a blood sample now. Would he even wake up? Sherlock considered it, then decided against it in favor of lying in the bed and staring up at the ceiling for a bit longer and thinking how it was possible Mycroft had bought him a Stradivarius when he had been eleven years old.

Maybe he _was_ a bit drunk, he allowed. And his experiment was now completely invalidated as a result. Dammit. 

Quiet pressed in around him. Lestrade must have stopped snoring. Sherlock checked the position of the gun under his pillow. John had left him the gun, because John always left him the gun when he went places. Sometimes Sherlock fought him on this, mostly because Sherlock hated to admit a lingering paranoia that made him feel better sleeping with a gun under his pillow, if he was going to sleep alone. Luckily, he’d not had to sleep alone very often since returning from the dead. If he told John he slept with the gun under his pillow when John wasn’t around, John would never leave again. Something to consider, he mused. 

His hand snaked out and found his mobile where he’d left it on the bedside table, where he always left it on the bedside table. He frowned at it. No texts, no missed calls. Unacceptable. 

He phoned John. 

John picked up almost immediately, sounding much wider awake than he should have for the time of night it was. Or the time of early morning it was. “What’s wrong?” he asked by way of greeting. 

“Nothing’s wrong,” said Sherlock to the ceiling, forced to say it to the ceiling because John wasn’t actually _there_. Which was what was wrong. “Actually, you’re not here. So, that’s wrong.”

“You never phone when you can text,” replied John, as if Sherlock hadn’t spoken. “So tell me what’s wrong.”

Sherlock inhaled slowly. The room smelled faintly of John, which was a good thing. He said, to the moonlight on his ceiling, “When I was…dead, I used to lay awake at night listening to the quiet, waiting for…noise.”

John was silent, a silence Sherlock couldn’t quite read, which was annoying. He wanted John’s face in front of him, so he could tell exactly what he was thinking. “Sherlock,” he said, carefully, almost gently, which annoyed Sherlock, because nothing annoyed Sherlock more than _gentleness_. “There’s no one left to—”

“I would pick up my mobile,” Sherlock continued, cutting him off, “and I would press in your number and I would lay with my finger hovering over the ‘send’ button, telling myself not to do it. One call from an unknown number, even if it was just me listening to you saying ‘hello’ once or twice, listening to a breath from you, before hanging up, even if it was just a missed call, one you never picked up, one call and I knew you would know. I couldn’t risk it. So I never phoned you.” 

John said nothing. Silence stretched. 

“Today, without you, was too much like…being dead,” Sherlock finished. “But now I can phone you. So I have.”

“You’re daft,” said John, finally, but he said it very fondly and very fully. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“But I call and you answer,” Sherlock pointed out, satisfied. Everything felt much better in his world. Even with Greg Lestrade asleep on his sofa. 

“Our relationship, in a nutshell,” agreed John. 

Sherlock smiled and closed his eyes, feeling drowsy now and pleased that he’d rung John. “I think we’re married, John.”

“I bloody well hope not. When we get married, I’m going to make you vow to obey me.”

Sherlock heard the _when_. He didn’t comment. He turned his head into his pillow, feeling the outline of the gun underneath it, and said, confidently, “You would be bored to tears.”

“Do you think you can sleep now?” John asked, and Sherlock heard him smother a yawn on the other end of the phone. 

“I could always have slept,” Sherlock denied, “I just wanted to ring you first.”

“Uh-huh,” said John, skeptically. “I’ll be home tomorrow.”

“Will you?” That penetrated his sleepiness a bit, but possibly betrayed his drunkenness a bit, because he heard the unmitigated delight in his voice. 

“Yes. Things went well with Harry, and once I have her sorted…”

For once, Sherlock decided to refrain from pointing out that it would just be another cycle for Harry, that John would be going through this all again, it was only a matter of time. He said, “By tomorrow, do you mean today or tomorrow?”

There was a pause. “I mean today, I suppose.”

“Good. That’s better. Good night, John.”

“Good night,” John answered. “And I love you, too.”

Sherlock pretended to ignore that the way he always pretended to ignore it, but he fell asleep with a hum of pleasure buzzing through him and woke with the mobile still in his hand.


	5. Chapter 5

Mycroft was still awake when the driver rang to tell him Greg was spending the night at Baker Street. In fact, he was working, taking advantage of Greg not being there to tell him it was far too late and cajole him into bed. Given a choice, Mycroft would have preferred to have Greg home for the night but he was determined to find silver linings to those nights when Greg was busy, the primary one being that he could catch up on the work he found himself perpetually behind on since being in a relationship. 

So Mycroft finished what he was doing and fixed himself a nightcap and sat by the fire in the library and thought through various problems he’d have to address the following day. Then he went to bed, waking exactly on time without the aid of an alarm, as he always did. He got ready for his day and read the papers as he scrolled through his BlackBerry and ate his breakfast. Things seemed to be under control, and he told the PA on duty he’d be in a bit late and asked Reynolds to bring him fresh clothing for Greg. Reynolds returned with a garment bag and a travel mug, which Mycroft lifted his eyebrows at. 

“His coffee,” explained Reynolds. 

“I think you are being very optimistic if you think Inspector Lestrade will be having coffee this morning,” remarked Mycroft. 

Reynolds looked surprised. “Isn’t he at work?”

Which Mycroft realized was the last Reynolds had heard about the previous evening. “He is definitely not at work,” Mycroft told him. “But I shall take him the coffee; it was kind of you to prepare it.”

Mycroft directed his car to Baker Street and contemplated the cruelty of ringing the bell for 221B. He decided to ring the bell for 221A instead. Much kinder. 

Mrs. Hudson opened the door for him and said, “Oh, Mycroft, are they not answering the bell?”

“I didn’t ring it.” Mycroft stepped through the doorway. “I suspect they are not in a state to answer a doorbell, at present.”

“Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Hudson, and tsk’d a bit and shook her head. “Well. Boys will be boys, won’t they? They were in high spirits last night.”

“Indeed. Did you encounter them?”

“Only briefly, but they were having a laugh and enjoying themselves, so no harm done.”

“None at all,” agreed Mycroft, and began ascending the stairs. 

“Shall I bring you some tea, then, Mycroft?” Mrs. Hudson asked. 

“Tea would be sublime,” responded Mycroft, politely, and stepped into his brother’s lounge. 

Greg was asleep on the sofa, curled into his coat, and Mycroft sighed and pulled the blanket off the back of the sofa and draped it over him, which Greg cuddled into immediately. Mycroft settled the garment bag on Sherlock’s chair and the travel mug on the coffee table, set his umbrella by John’s chair, sat, and checked his BlackBerry. 

Mrs. Hudson eventually came in with a tea tray. Mycroft put a finger to his lips and then pointed to Greg’s sleeping form, and she nodded and put the tea tray down and looked fondly at Greg on her way out of the room. She had always been extremely fond of Greg, which Mycroft appreciated, because Greg’s fondness for him meant Mrs. Hudson was far nicer to him than she had been when he was just Sherlock’s older brother. 

Mycroft poured out two cups of tea and then looked up expectantly at Sherlock, who had appeared in the doorway, fully dressed and looking none the worse for wear, if one didn’t count the dour expression of displeasure on his face, which Mycroft did not, because that was merely Sherlock’s usual expression. 

“Won’t you join me?” he asked, with exaggerated courtesy, keeping his voice low for Greg’s sake and indicating the other cup of tea.

Sherlock glanced at Greg on the sofa, then back to Mycroft. “I think we should take a walk,” he announced, flatly. 

Mycroft couldn’t hide his surprise. “A walk? You and I?”

But Sherlock had already pulled on his coat and disappeared down the staircase. 

***

Mycroft took forever to follow him outside, and Sherlock considered just leaving him behind, but there was no point to taking the walk if Mycroft wasn’t with him so he waited, fidgeting impatiently so Mycroft would know that he was unreasonably slow. He started walking as soon as Mycroft emerged, at a punishing pace, but Mycroft sauntered behind him and forced him to slow down and he snapped at him, “Can’t you walk any _faster_?”

Mycroft regarded him blandly. “Do I need to walk faster? Have we a destination in mind? A looming deadline?”

Sherlock set his jaw and hated him. He matched Mycroft’s steps and Mycroft twirled his umbrella idly and Sherlock refused to say anything until Mycroft did, just on _principle_. 

“Are we supposed to be making small talk?” Mycroft asked, finally. 

“Absolutely not,” huffed Sherlock. 

So of course that was what Mycroft did. He had walked right into that one. “Did you have a good time last night?” asked Mycroft, innocently. 

“No,” said Sherlock, sulkily. 

“Fine,” allowed Mycroft, with that condescending shrug he had. “Greg had a good time.”

“No, he didn’t. How do you know? Anyway, he’s asleep on my sofa, and that’s unacceptable.”

“Your life is very hard,” said Mycroft. 

Sherlock frowned at him. 

“You could have sent him home,” Mycroft continued. 

“He wouldn’t have gone home, because you had asked him to baby-sit me and he’d never disobey a direct order from you.”

Mycroft sighed. “That isn’t how it works. I don’t give him orders.”

“Yes, you do. That’s how you communicate. Do this, do that, et cetera.”

“Go to Eton,” said Mycroft, sounding bored. “Cut your hair. Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ Stop taking cocaine.”

Sherlock rounded on him suddenly. “Did you buy my violin for me?”

Mycroft was challengingly too good at lying. Sherlock had been trying for years to determine how to tell when Mycroft was lying and when he wasn’t. He was decent at it these days, but there was no telltale movement on Mycroft’s part that could be depended upon to give him away. Despite Sherlock deliberately employing an element of surprise, Mycroft didn’t flinch at the question. Mycroft raised an eyebrow and said, “Your violin? No. It belonged to Father. I told you that.”

 _Unnecessary elaboration_ , thought Sherlock, which was sometimes one of Mycroft’s tells. More information in response to a question than he would have given had he not been lying. Sherlock looked at him and wondered how it had never occurred to him before to even ask this question. He wondered if he should do something now that he knew Mycroft was lying. He wondered if he should insist Mycroft admit it, which would mean that Sherlock would do what in response? Berate him for getting him the violin? Give the violin back? Sherlock was well-acquainted with the technique of cutting off his nose to spite his brother’s face, but giving back a Stradivarius he’d had for decades seemed a bit extreme. Even for him. He had to admit. 

He considered his options and Mycroft’s face and said, carefully, “Lestrade thinks otherwise.”

“And you trust his conclusions on this matter?” asked Mycroft. Sherlock translated this easily. _You know I’m lying, and I know you know, and you know I know you know, so either make a fuss about it or move on_.

“He _was_ drunk,” Sherlock agreed, after a second, which was the same as saying, _Forget it, let’s not talk about it again. Also, maybe, thank you_. So, thought Sherlock, good enough on that front. All settled. They had nearly done a full circuit of the block, the doorway to 221 only a few meters away, so it was good timing. 

“Cruel of you to drink him under the table that way,” Mycroft said. _Yes, all settled_. 

“Instructive,” Sherlock responded, crisply, and opened the door. “He’s fine. No need to have me killed.”

“Not for that reason, at least,” said Mycroft. _Also, you’re welcome_. 

Mrs. Hudson peeked her head around her door in her version of stealthy spying, which saved Sherlock from a response to that. 

“Good morning, Mrs. Hudson,” he said, with extravagant pleasantness.

“Good morning,” she responded. “How are you feeling, Sherlock?”

“I am fine,” Sherlock responded. “There is nothing wrong with _me_.”

“In fact,” said Mycroft to Mrs. Hudson, “is it possible for you to bring us up some bacon sandwiches? Sherlock must be starving, and I’m sure Inspector Lestrade will be as well, and your bacon sandwiches are better than anyone else’s.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Hudson, flutteringly pleased at Mycroft’s transparent flattery, and Sherlock frowned sourly. “I was just making some bacon!”

“Were you?” asked Mycroft, smoothly, as if the entire foyer didn’t smell of bacon. 

Sherlock frowned some more. 

“I’ll be right up with some,” said Mrs. Hudson. 

“Thank you _so_ much,” said Mycroft, and Mrs. Hudson went back to her flat and Mycroft turned to walk up the stairs and Sherlock tried to get his brain accustomed to the idea of a bacon sandwich. “Come along, Sherlock, aren’t you hungry?”

Sherlock wished he could frown more than he was currently doing. He felt _deeper_ frowning was called for, somehow. He was the very opposite of hungry, and Mycroft knew it. “A bacon sandwich? For Lestrade? And you call _me_ cruel?”

“And for you. I wouldn’t want you to feel left out.” Mycroft paused at the top of the staircase and looked down at him. “And I believe you would call it instructive, wouldn’t you?” Mycroft smiled at him. 

***

Lestrade woke with the sure knowledge that he would feel much better if he could sleep for a little while longer and the sure knowledge there was no way the universe was going to be kind enough to let him sleep for a little while longer. He kept his eyes closed for a while anyway, just in case. But he became aware of other people breathing in the room. Breathing _loudly_. 

He opened his eyes. 

Mycroft was seated in John’s usual chair, a cup of tea in one hand and his BlackBerry in the other, reading something he was scrolling through. Sherlock was seated opposite him, sulking very hard over what looked like a bacon sandwich, which made Lestrade close his eyes queasily. 

“Good morning,” said Mycroft, cheerfully. 

“Shut up,” Lestrade told him, and knew that Mycroft thought that was hilarious, and hated him a little bit for that. 

“Get up,” snapped Sherlock. “If I have to be up for this, you have to be up for this.”

“Why are you shouting at me?” Lestrade demanded. 

“No one’s shouting at you, that’s your headache,” said Mycroft. “Here.”

Lestrade opened one eye to see what Mycroft was offering. It was a pill and a glass of water. “What’s that?”

Mycroft lifted his eyebrows. “Don’t even attempt to deny you have a headache; you are definitely not anywhere near equipped to try to lie to me right now.”

“I have a headache, but my question is what is _that_?” He nodded feebly toward the pill. 

“It will help your headache.”

The odds of the pill being something unremarkable like paracetamol seemed very low. “Is it legal?” he asked. 

“In which country?” responded Mycroft. 

“Oh, God,” groaned Lestrade. “Forget it, don’t tell me. So long as it won’t kill me.” He sat up gingerly, relieved when his head didn’t completely fall off, and took the pill and the proffered water. 

“So far, your chance of death resulting from this particular pill is only 7.3%, and you’re fairly hale and hearty, so I like your odds,” said Mycroft, walking back over to John’s chair. 

“I think you should break up with him,” Sherlock told him. 

“I’m considering it,” said Lestrade, and took the pill. 

“I got you and your sergeant excused from work with a story about how you were needed for special business by the Queen,” remarked Mycroft. 

“And then you go and do something useful like that and it becomes bloody difficult to get rid of you,” Lestrade replied. 

Sherlock rolled his eyes and sighed heavily and pushed away his bacon sandwich. “I refuse to eat this,” he announced. “On _principle_.”

“Certainly you do,” said Mycroft, dryly. “Also, I suppose, for scientific purposes, you would like a pill as well?”

“I don’t have a headache, if that’s what you’re getting at,” sniffed Sherlock, primly, “but if this pill of yours should kill Lestrade, don’t you think it would be helpful to be able to study its effects on my system?”

“How would that be helpful if Lestrade is already dead?” Mycroft asked, but he shook another pill out of a bottle he produced from his inner coat jacket. 

Sherlock accepted the pill and studied it very closely before taking it. 

Mycroft glanced at his BlackBerry again, frowned, and abruptly pocketed it. “I really have to go.” He looked at Lestrade. “Do you feel as if you’re going to survive?”

“Yes. Is that why you’re here? To make sure I’m going to survive?”

“Not entirely,” said Mycroft, rising. “I did call you and Colin out.”

“But nothing about the Queen?”

“No.”

“Anything about four tequila shots?”

Mycroft smiled. “No. I’ll see you later, hmm?” He leaned down and brushed a kiss across Lestrade’s temple, mostly necessary because Lestrade did not feel capable of tipping his head to give him access to his lips and also did not think his lips were currently in any state to be kissed. 

“Revolting,” said Sherlock. 

“More so than the bacon sandwich?” asked Mycroft, mildly, as he strode out of the lounge. 

Mrs. Hudson passed him on the way, with another bacon sandwich on a plate, and she said to Lestrade, in delight, “Oh, you’re awake! I just finished making the bacon sandwich for you, like Mycroft asked.”

Mycroft was already halfway down the stairs, so Lestrade had to shout, “You’re a terrible person!”

The front door closed. 

Sherlock said, “I can’t help being related to him. You’re _choosing_ to date him.”

***

John was just lifting his hand to open the door on 221 Baker Street when Lestrade opened it from the other side, looking as if a truck had hit him. 

“Greg,” said John, in surprise. “What happened to you?”

“Thank God you’re home,” said Lestrade by way of answer. “He is officially your responsibility again.” Lestrade stepped past him, and a sleek black car pulled up for him immediately. 

“You didn’t have to watch him all this time,” said John, turning to watch Lestrade reach for the car’s back door. 

“Most of the time it was enjoyable,” Lestrade replied. “Just now, he is in a pout, and I am going home. Did things go well?” He asked it almost as an afterthought. 

“Yeah,” said John. “I think so.”

“Good.” Lestrade smiled briefly, then disappeared into the car. 

John turned back to the door he was holding open and stepped through it. A stampede of wild horses was apparently ransacking his flat, judging from the noise emanating from the top of the stairs. No wonder Lestrade had fled. John merely listened to the chaos of it, things crashing and banging and shattering, and relaxed, felt the ache go out of his shoulder and the tension from his stance. It was good to be home, he thought. 

He walked up the stairs and stood in the doorway to the lounge. 

Sherlock had his head stuck in the fireplace. “You’re home,” he announced to the chimney, his voice muffled. 

“What are you doing?” John asked. 

“Samples,” said Sherlock, coming back out of the fireplace with something cradled in his hand. 

John took the usual approach to Sherlock’s experiments, which was not to look too closely or ask too many questions. “I just met Greg, on his way out. He looked terrible. What sort of case did you have, anyway?”

“No case.” Sherlock dumped whatever he had into a pile he’d cleared on his desk. John kept his eyes averted from it, and Sherlock briskly rubbed dust—or something—off of his hands. 

“No case?” echoed John. “Then what have you been doing?”

“You know me,” answered Sherlock. “Went out for a couple of pints with friends.” He walked over to him, with his version of a grin on his face, which John always found terrifying. 

“No, you didn’t,” said John. “You don’t do that. And don’t you dare think of touching me before you’ve washed your hands.”

Sherlock ignored him, fastened his hands into his hair and kissed him thoroughly. Which John was okay with. “You’re never leaving me again,” Sherlock decided, when he’d had enough of kissing him, which was after quite a decent interval of time had passed, really. “Everything was deadly dull without you. I had to talk to _Mycroft_. A _lot_. And no one killed anyone else.”

“Some people would consider that a good thing.”

“Idiots,” said Sherlock. 

“I’m not going to ask you what’s over all your hands.”

“It’s now in your hair,” Sherlock pointed out. 

“I know. I’m going to try not to think about that, and just suggest we take a shower.”

Sherlock brightened. “See? Not boring anymore. No one else takes showers with me.” Sherlock was walking John backward, through the doorway, heading to the en suite off their bedroom, his hands still caressing John’s scalp in a way that would be soothing if John didn’t think too hard about how filthy they probably were. 

“I hope you don’t ask anyone else to take showers with you,” said John. 

“Well, I don’t make a _habit_ of it,” Sherlock told him, and kissed him again.


	6. Chapter 6

Lestrade texted Colin to let him know that no one was expecting them at New Scotland Yard and went home. 

Reynolds took one look at him when he trailed in the door and whatever he had been about to say died off into, “…Oh.”

“I must look _terrible_ ,” said Lestrade. “John, who is never rude, said that I did, and you’ve been startled out of calling me ‘sir.’”

Reynolds regarded him. “You’ve looked better. Sir,” he said, and then he smiled. “You probably need lots of water.”

“Probably,” Lestrade agreed. “I’m going to take a shower first, and then I am going to collapse in the media room and watch _Jeremy Kyle_. And we’re not going to tell Mycroft that’s what I did all day.”

“As you wish, sir,” said Reynolds. 

Lestrade showered and changed into clothing so old and comfortable that he suspected Mycroft would have a heart attack to even find out he owned such things. But it was the sort of day that called for it. Reynolds brought him a pitcher of water and left him alone in the media room and Lestrade watched Mycroft’s illegal cable and dozed off and on until the door opened and Mycroft walked in with something that smelled delicious. 

Lestrade half sat up and said, “Did you bring fish and chips?”

“Along with myself, but I see where your priorities are,” Mycroft answered, wryly, and handed him the bag. 

“No, no, I’m happy to see you, too,” said Lestrade, absently, as he made room for Mycroft to sit on the sofa with him. “But how did you know I was craving fish and chips?”

“Hangover,” said Mycroft, indicating Lestrade, and then indicated the bag. “Grease.”

“How do you know about greasy foods and hangovers?” Lestrade munched gleefully on a chip. 

“I went to uni, too, you know.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve ever been hungover in your life.” Lestrade thought to offer him a chip. He regarded it dubiously, but nipped it out of his hand gamely. 

“No, but I’ve observed the state in others. Not bad,” he pronounced the chip. 

“Are you kidding? They’re bloody gorgeous. I’m going to get you roaringly drunk someday.”

Mycroft propped an elbow on the back of the sofa and regarded him as he wolfed down the food. “You already make me tipsy enough, just being here.”

Lestrade nudged at Mycroft’s hip with his foot. “What a line,” he said. 

“Calling it a line implies that it’s untrue. I imagine it was Sherlock who talked you into the cigarette?”

Lestrade made a face. “It was just one, I swear.”

“I know it was just one.”

“And Sherlock said you’re not to be judgmental, because you’ve been known to sneak one every now and then. This was something I did not know about you.”

“I don’t think I like it when you socialize with my brother.”

“The tequila was his idea, too. He’s a terrible influence.”

“Yes. You were supposed to be moderating him.”

“I did the best I could.”

“I’m a little sad I missed it,” remarked Mycroft. “John’s home now. Things went well with Harry. For a given value of ‘well.’”

“I know. I ran into him on my way out. She’s in rehab?”

“Yes. And hopefully it will work this time.”

“I never thought I’d say this, but I wish everyone were as stubborn as Sherlock.”

“I never thought I’d agree with you,” sighed Mycroft.

Lestrade felt the mood grow heavy around them and tried to lighten it. “Get a bottle of tequila and we’ll work through it one night. One night when I’ve forgotten how terrible I felt all day today.”

Mycroft chuckled and glanced at the television. “What have you been watching?”

“I may have told Sherlock you bought him his violin,” said Lestrade.

Mycroft looked back at him and smiled. “Oh, I know. Sherlock already confronted me about it.”

Lestrade winced. “I didn’t know it was a secret. You should have told me.”

“At the time I told you about it, it didn’t occur to me that it would ever come up again in our futures. Anyway, I doubt the knowledge that it was a secret would have survived the four tequilas.”

Lestrade frowned at that, then allowed, putting aside the destroyed bag of fish and chips, “All right, maybe you’re right about that. What did you eat for dinner?” he asked, as it occurred to him. 

“You didn’t think that the person I lied to was you?” asked Mycroft, instead of answering the question. 

“Oh,” said Lestrade, meeting his gaze. “No. Of course not.”

“Why not?”

A million things that he could not put into words. An instinct that Mycroft, with his reliance on facts at all times, would probably never understand. He answered, confused by the effort of articulating it, “I don’t know, because…I know you, I suppose.”

Mycroft leaned over abruptly and kissed him hard, and then just as abruptly leaned back as if he hadn’t done that at all. 

Lestrade straightened his scattered thoughts. “Did Sherlock give you a hard time about it?”

“No. We have agreed to pretend that I lied to you and told him the truth and that the violin came from our father.”

Lestrade lifted his eyebrows. “You agreed to this?” 

“Not in so many words, but yes, definitely agreed. Can we shut this off?” He gestured to the television. 

“Yes, I’m not really watching it. I don’t understand how the two of you communicate.”

Mycroft reached past him for the remote control. “I don’t mean to be rude to you, but it isn’t necessary for you to understand how we communicate, just for us to understand it.” Mycroft shut off the television. 

“He refuses to come into this house. And he means it seriously. He’s not just annoying you, he—”

“Sherlock was living in this house when our mother died. He hasn’t come back since then.” Mycroft’s voice had a clipped quality to it that Lestrade recognized: He didn’t want to continue this conversational topic. 

Lestrade was briefly frustrated, because Mycroft was close-lipped at best when it came to the Holmes family history and Lestrade would have liked to know how he and Sherlock had ended up so… _unique_. But he thought of other things he wanted to know more than how hard Sherlock had taken his mother’s death. He ventured, “Can I ask you something?”

Mycroft hesitated the briefest instant, and Lestrade thought if it had been anyone other than him speaking to Mycroft, the pause would have gone completely unnoticed. “You can,” he answered, carefully, clearly bracing himself. 

“Sherlock said that your motto is that caring is not an advantage.”

Mycroft looked at him. “That isn’t a question.”

“Is that your motto?”

“It isn’t an advantage in a chess game, Greg.”

“You’ve never said this to me. Not once. Not even when you were teaching me chess.”

Mycroft regarded him for a long, silent moment. “What good would it have done me to tell you that was my motto? When I was so obviously ignoring it? Caring isn’t an advantage. It makes you illogical and vulnerable. And I know you know that, because I watch you glance at CCTV cameras every once in a while, to assure me you’re there and you’re fine because you hate to think about what I might do if you weren’t. There is no way in which it’s an advantage.”

“So you do spy on me using the CCTV cameras.”

“I spy on you more than you would like, but less than I would like. That’s our compromise.”

“I didn’t realize we’d reached this compromise.”

“Yes, you did, or you’d never give the CCTV cameras the little looks that you give them.”

“I don’t want you to worry about me,” said Lestrade. 

“That can’t be helped. That’s what caring does to one’s concentration. One worries about the people one cares about constantly. It is in no way an advantage.”

Lestrade considered him. He spoke as if the effort were exhausting, and Lestrade imagined that it was. Lestrade thought of the way he felt when he was in the middle of a particularly challenging case, when there was already too much on his plate, and tried to add on top of that worry that at any minute something terrible might happen to Mycroft. Lestrade did not normally worry about that; Mycroft was absurdly well-protected, as far as he could see, but he thought that worrying about Mycroft on top of everything else he had to worry about would have been overwhelming. He wasn’t sure how Mycroft accomplished it. So he said, because it was true and he wanted Mycroft to remember it was true, “Except when you come home at the end of the day and the house isn’t empty, and the rest of the players on the board can go to hell. Then it’s a pretty big advantage, I think.”

Mycroft looked at him and smiled and said, “Yes. I’ve reached the same conclusion.”

***

His Sherlock-emergency-only mobile was vibrating. Granted, it was no longer quite a Sherlock-emergency-only mobile. This meant it was no longer shocking when it rang, because Greg had the number, and, while Greg didn’t phone him frequently, he phoned him often enough. 

But Mycroft glanced at the mobile now and was surprised to see that it wasn’t Greg phoning him, but Sherlock. 

Well, thought Mycroft. This couldn’t possibly be good. Or it was going to be delightfully entertaining. One never knew. 

He answered the phone. “What crisis is befalling us?”

“There is a case,” Sherlock snapped at him, clearly already in an advanced state of fuming, wherever he was. Mycroft could hear John’s voice saying something, and pitied him having to deal with Sherlock at the moment. 

“Is there?” he responded, with minor interest. 

“The man with the Hyde Park swan,” said Sherlock. 

“And the noteworthy tooth,” added Mycroft. “I’m familiar with the case. It is an interesting one, isn’t it? What’s the matter? Scotland Yard not want to play?”

“They have called me in to _ignore_ me. They are not listening to a single thing I’m—I will not keep my voice down, John. I hope I am indeed shouting loud enough to wake the dead, because even the dead should be made aware of the stupidity of this city’s police force. _Especially_ the dead. _Especially_ the dead man with the swan.”

“May I speak to John?” asked Mycroft. 

“No,” Sherlock told him. “You need to get me Lestrade.”

“What do you mean, ‘get you Lestrade’? Ring him yourself.”

“I did. He says it’s not his case and there’s nothing he can do.”

“About what?”

“About the fact that they’re not listening to me. He says he’s done everything he can.”

“Well, if he’s said he’s—”

“Get the case transferred to him.”

Mycroft paused. “That’s a terrible idea, Sherlock.”

“Why is it a terrible idea? He’s clever enough to listen to me. Not like these imbeciles here. Oh, do you think they heard that, John? What a pity.”

“I can’t have cases transferred to him at your whim.”

“Yes, you can.”

Fair point, Mycroft allowed. “I won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it would be a diplomatic disaster for him, and he has to work with his colleagues every day.”

“As if it’s not a diplomatic disaster for him that his butler brings him dinner whenever he has to work late?” inquired Sherlock, scathingly. 

“I always make sure to send enough dinner for everyone,” Mycroft defended himself, stiffly. 

“Whatever. You are being useless to me, and that’s not fair, when all I want to do is work with Lestrade because he’s practically _family_.”

Mycroft actually laughed. “Is he now?”

“Like a _brother_ to me,” said Sherlock, emphatically. 

“Now that I would believe, actually. Given what I know about the depths of your fraternal feelings, I feel quite comfortable telling you to live without Greg and allow John to act as a buffer between you and whoever the imbeciles are that you are working with.”

“Mycroft,” Sherlock began, angrily. 

“I shall offer you some advice, though, to cease calling them imbeciles. That might go a long way to improving your working relationship.”

“Mycr—”

Mycroft ended the call before Sherlock could finish saying his name and called Greg. 

Greg answered with, “Is this about the man with the swan? Because I’ve already called Dimmock and tried to get him to take Sherlock in a bit more stride than he’s doing. It would help if Sherlock stopped shouting at the swans.”

“He’s shouting at the swans?”

“According to Dimmock.”

“Oh,” said Mycroft. “Well, of course. The detail with the watch. I should have seen that immediately.”

Greg sighed. “There are times you’re nearly as annoying as he is.”

“You don’t mean that,” said Mycroft. “Sherlock wants you on the case.”

“Of course he does. Because I let him do whatever he wants.”

“Because you’re his _favorite_ , Greg,” corrected Mycroft, wryly. 

“Yes. Again: Because I let him do whatever he wants.”

“You’re like family to him. He thinks of you as a brother.”

“What are you even talking about?”

“Sherlock is in fine form.”

“He is a lunatic.”

“He’s actually not; he just finds it advantageous to let people think that. Do you want the case?”

“No,” said Greg, immediately. “Don’t lift a single finger about this.”

“I wasn’t going to, unless you told me you want the case.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, of course I want the case; it’s a bloody fabulous case, but it’s Dimmock’s case and I’m not going down the path of using you to get me all of the most interesting cases. It’s bad enough I already get the proportion I do because they get tossed to me when they go unsolved so I can get Sherlock in.”

“I assumed that would be your stance; I just wanted to verify.”

“Yes. That’s my stance. Now I have to go because I have to do the paperwork that Sherlock creates but never bothers to do.”

“At heart, Greg, you’re really just a bureaucrat like me.”

“At heart, I’m _more_ of a bureaucrat than you,” Greg grumbled, and ended the call. 

***

Sherlock stepped into his office doorway just as he was standing to go in pursuit of another cup of coffee. Mycroft had texted he would be home late, and a text rather than a call meant he would be very late indeed, and Lestrade was taking advantage of it to try to puzzle his way through the stray details of a fairly cold murder still sitting on his desk. 

Lestrade glanced at him and said, “Ah. I thought you were in the building. I heard the murderous commotion. The man with the Hyde Park swan?”

“Sorted,” said Sherlock, shortly. “No thanks to you.”

“I did everything I could. You brought the rest of it upon yourself. See this case?” He lifted up the file on the cold case. “Do you think you could deign to help me with this now? Or are you going to punish me by sulking and telling me to do it myself, the way you did the last time I asked you about it?”

Sherlock frowned and said, “How can you not have solved that yet? It was the courier’s boyfriend’s mother.”

Who wasn’t even on Lestrade’s list of suspects. “Of course it was,” he said, wearily, and dropped the case back on his desk. “Sometimes, you know, you make me feel like I’m pretty bloody terrible at my job.”

“You’re not, though,” said Sherlock, which was such an uncharacteristic remark from him that Lestrade looked at him in surprise. He spoke carefully, his words brittle, and the expression on his face was one of disgusted disbelief, as if someone else had taken over his voice and he couldn’t abide the things that person had decided to say. “You’re very good at what you do. Almost stunningly good, in comparison to the display of mediocrity I saw today.”

“Can you ever just give a straight compliment without insulting someone else at the same time?” asked Lestrade. 

“No. That’s what a compliment is, isn’t it? You’re better than somebody else, in some way. That’s a compliment.”

Lestrade sighed helplessly. “I suppose.”

“Are you going home?” Sherlock asked him. 

“No. Not yet. Now that you’ve solved this case for me, I can start to go through what we have so we can prove it.”

“I can walk you through that.”

He was being strangely helpful. Lestrade tipped his head at him. “Thanks. Are you…sick? Feverish?”

Sherlock looked annoyed. “No. Why would you say that?”

“Because you…” Lestrade decided not to start a fight by pointing out how sort of nice Sherlock was being. “Nothing. Never mind.”

“So. That case is sorted. Are you going home now?”

Lestrade stared at him, trying to figure out the purpose of the question, of any of Sherlock’s behavior here. Something to do with Mycroft…? “No. I thought I’d catch up on some paperwork.”

“Are you avoiding going home?”

“Mycroft’s working late. What’s this all about?”

Sherlock looked pleased. “Oh, but this is excellent.”

“What’s excellent about it?” Lestrade asked, warily. 

“We can go for a pint,” Sherlock concluded, gleefully. “You can ring Colin, and he can come along.”

“Wait,” said Lestrade, blinking at him and thinking he might be hallucinating. “What?”

“Hurry up,” said Sherlock. “Put on your coat. And bring an umbrella this time. It’s raining, and Mycroft will fuss at me if you catch cold.”

“Where’s John? Is he putting you up to this?”

“John’s securing our mobiles from evidence.”

“What are your mobiles doing in evidence?”

“Dimmock hates me.”

Lestrade tried not to laugh but he didn’t achieve it. “I wish I’d thought to put your mobiles in evidence at some point.”

“Don’t be childish,” said Sherlock, on a sigh, as if he weren’t the most childish person Lestrade had ever met. 

Lestrade retrieved his coat. “Why are we going to the pub?”

“You’re so suspicious.”

“I’m a policeman. It’s my job to be suspicious.” He pulled his coat on, straightened his collar. 

“It’s your job to solve crimes, and even that seems to be debatable as far as I can tell.”

Lestrade followed him through the maze of hallways toward the exit. “You think you’re going to distract me from the question by insulting me, but I will not be distracted.”

“You were just complaining that I was complimenting you; now you’re complaining that I’m insulting you,” said Sherlock. 

Lestrade ignored him. “Why are we going to the pub?”

Sherlock stopped by the exit, and Lestrade assumed this was their rendezvous point for John. Sherlock shifted his weight and looked piercingly at Lestrade and said, deliberately, “Because I like you, and we are friends, and friends go to the pub together.”

“Oh, my God,” Lestrade realized. “This is about the fact that I wouldn’t let Mycroft give the case to me.”

Sherlock blinked innocently. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You think I’ll be so touched by this display on your part that I will, in the future, always do everything I can to make your consulting experiences as pleasant as possible.”

“Well?” snapped Sherlock, impatiently, and Lestrade thought in amusement that Sherlock never could quite keep up his facades for long enough. “Is it working?”

“No, it’s not working. You _do_ like me, and we _are_ friends, but I knew that before today, so you’ve not changed anything about the situation.”

Sherlock frowned at him and looked offended by Lestrade’s nerve in saying such things. 

John came up to them and said to Sherlock, “Uh-oh. What’s that expression for? You told me you had a good time at the pub last time.”

“He had an excellent time,” agreed Lestrade, and Sherlock frowned even harder and looked even more offended. 

“So you really did go to the pub with him,” remarked John. “I half-thought he was lying about that this whole time.”

“We went to the pub. We’ll go to the pub again tonight. We’ll teach you how to play our drinking game.”

“You have your own drinking game?” asked John, leaning past them to open the door. “This sounds promising.”

“It’s a terrible drinking game,” said Sherlock. 

“It’s a brilliant drinking game,” said Lestrade, walking out into the rain and realizing he had managed once again to forget his umbrella. “No tequila this time, though.”

“The tequila’s the whole _point_ ,” Sherlock complained. 

“No,” said Lestrade. “It really isn’t.”

He had the satisfaction of Sherlock doing nothing but huffing in reply, which was Sherlock’s concession that Lestrade’s statement was correct. Lestrade decided not to push his luck by saying what the real point was. He said instead, “I’ll phone Colin.”

And Sherlock said, primly, “Thank you, Inspector.”

THE END


End file.
